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]]>http://apeagency.com/best-cyber-monday-deals-for-online-business-getresponse-hostgator-optimizepress/feed/0Google News SEO: How to get in Google News by The Telegraph at BrightonSEO 2016http://apeagency.com/google-news-seo-how-to-get-in-google-news-by-the-telegraph-at-brightonseo-2016/
http://apeagency.com/google-news-seo-how-to-get-in-google-news-by-the-telegraph-at-brightonseo-2016/#respondSat, 03 Sep 2016 22:31:58 +0000http://apeagency.com/?p=7022

2nd search behaviour – if you write “what time does ___ start?” Newspapers get loads of people from that. When there is an event on, people search this, write a compelling preview to keep them interested. You want good content as you don’t want them to click and get the time, then hit back and go somewhere else for better content. News sites have written thousands of “What time is [this event on] “ articles, also “What TV channel is it on”.

Click through rate – Can get ideas from the rising related queries list on google insights, e.g. for arsenal, people were searching for “arsenal deadline day”. If you have a slightly quirky headline, it gets a good click through rate, and once something like that gets in the news box it tends to stay there as it gets good click through rate.

Example of quirky headline that worked with good click through rate was:

Princess Charlotte: Bow down to Kate
Middleton’s new baby – as it happened, May 4, 2015

Also “things we learned about/from X” has much higher click through rates than just “match report”. While people don’t search this, it optimizes the click through rate for search.

Amount of relevant specific content – in Germany, many newsrooms employ people to sit in the newsrooms and change the times on the article one by one.

E.g. People were searching “How much is Wimbledon Prize Money” after Andy Murray won Wimbledon, 5500 people a minute were turning up to the Telegraph website for that search query.

Return rate (bounce rate) – so if they click a result, go back and click another one, that first one will fall. Think about the searchers intent. At The Telegraph they embed an iframe so they can exactly match the content to whatever the searches intent was and avoid old content being cached.

Most news events are predictable, we know somebody will be evicted from a reality TV show or that the verdict is coming on a court case. News outlets pre-prepare articles for this that are released immediately when the news breaks.

The whole article contained all pre-written things like how she slumped in her chair and the prosecutor fist pumped the air. None of this ever happened as the verdict was actually “Not Guilty” and they hit publish on the wrong pre-prepared article!

But don’t do unless you know what you and doing and prepared for consquences of doing it wrong

Disavow harshly and you will kill the rankings in the same way a penalty would

Link Outreach Tips

Hi Firstname – is the best converting salutation, 15% best

Links from large media outlets in isolation is not that effective. E.g. The Telegraph, Mail Online, The Huffington Post, The Guardian, Buzzfeed etc. If you just stop once you get a few links from the nationals, that doesn’t translate into ranking positions as well as you would think. Due to structure of the site on large media outlets and volume of content, link equity dissolves as pages on those big news sites get buried quickly.

National media links work best when combined with secondary link building (get people to link to that, or use it as proof to get more links). Large media outlets don’t seem to provide as much link equity as you’d hope.

If niche publications were included as well as nationals the sites rankings did much better, so vary your link building.

Deeplink from Telegraph had majestic trustflow of 5, whereas link from niche publication periodliving.co.uk had trustflow of 15.

Most content marketing does not get the return to make it worth it alone unless you have the variety. National publications bury the link quickly. Small niche blogs are often too few readers and not enough trustflow or power.

Is the blog itself getting links and coverage, as that is much more valuable. Hence Majestic trustflow.

For Black Friday 2016 some of the world’s biggest web hosting companies have some HUGE Black Friday Deals and Coupons, bigger than anything you will see all year. Here are some of the best Black Friday Hosting Coupons from the biggest hosts including Hostgator, BlueHost, iPage and GoDaddy

Highly recommended – we use Hostgator ourselves for many sites and it has an excellent cpanel for 1-click wordpress installs, and allows unlimited domains, unlimited space, unlimited bandwidth and unlimited MySQL databases

From Friday, November 25th 12am CST to Tuesday November 29th 11:59pm CST, Hostgator are offering an astounding 65% OFF ALL hosting packages and $5.99 on select domains.

Offer: Save 30% off the first payment with WP Engine (so 5 months free on any annual subscription).
The coupon is applied in addition to the standard 2 months free discount when customers select an annual plan.

Awesome live band at the iGB Affiliate Awards on the Opening Night of London Affiliate Conference 2016

I will be at London Affiliate Conference 2016 on 4th – 7th February 2016 at Olympia London (with Hilton London Olympia Hotel as official hotel) so hit me up if any of you guys are in London.

We drive traffic for many verticals so any companies looking for affiliates/publishers please get in touch. Also any companies looking for consulting or hiring in London particularly for software sales or digital marketing I would love to chat. Read more about our company including business awards, books and keynote speeches on my linkedinand about page and get in touch here or via dave ‘at’ fatcowbusiness.com

Breaking away from PPC by numbersFri 11:00 – 11:30
Open Conference Room
Creative techniques that you can use to make Ads that stand out from the competition and attract clicks.
Speaker
Ben Wightman, Head Of Paid Search, Latitude

How to scale your SEO safely
Sat 12:20 – 13:00
Open Acquisiation Zone
The techniques and workflow used to deliver industrialised yet safe SEO at scale. The step by step process for delivering consistent results using data driven analysis in the most competitive markets, internationally free from detection with minimal risk. This is the first time this recipe for success has even been disclosed and the session provides delegates with never before seen insight as well as what they have learned over the past four years and what is expected throughout 2016.
Speaker:
Paul Reilly, Founder & CEO, Media Skunk Works

Blogging with a purpose: how to get more traffic and conversions with your blogSat 14:30 – 15:00
Conference Room 1
Speaker:
Aferdita Pacrami, CEO, 90 Digital

I met Wilco De Kreij at a conference in Sydney and his team develops awesome software for Facebook and Twitter and social media marketing and viral contests … his latest viral product is called UpViral and allows you to incentivize people to refer others and grow your site virally just like Airbnb, Uber and Dropbox.

Many major brands have used viral marketing to generate leads and increase sales with little or no paid ads. You’ve probably seen viral marketing happening by major brands right now on your own Facebook or Twitter feeds.

Viral marketing and inviting friends is what grew Dropbox to a $10 billion + company – Dropbox went from having just over 100,000 users to over 4 million users in just 15 months.

Research shows that people people trust recommendations from friends and family as much as seven times more than traditional advertising.

The results people are seeing with UpViral are nothing short of incredible. One beta tester netted 16,000+ subscribers in just 4 days, and many others have gotten thousands of leads in a few days with virtually no advertising. It’s all about viral marketing, by leveraging social media like Facebook and Twitter and getting your visitors, facebook fans and subscribers to send more people to you so you get more free traffic to your sites, landing pages, funnels and offers.

UpViral Features:

– Run Viral Giveaway Campaigns – Get your visitors to deliver more visitors by incentivizing them with a freebie or a prize. Example – once they enter their email, they have to refer 5 friends via their link to get access, so they share it like crazy on Facebook, Twitter, Email, Forums, their friends do the same and it just grows and grows

– Run Viral Contests – use a contest to promote your site, service or product via Facebook and Twitter. Example – when people enter your competition you can give them extra chances to win for every friend that enters via their link, and again this grows and grows virally.

– UpViral is incredibly easy to use and plugs right into your existing pages and sites – just insert a snippet of code and UpViral integrates with your existing autoresponder, landing pages, templates, pages and sites.

– UpViral is set up to run natively with most of the major autoresponders (Aweber, GetResponse, MailChimp, InfusionSoft and more). You can also also easily integrate it into your current tools such as LeadPages, ClickFunnels, WordPress and many others.

– Includes Pre-made, professional templates, customizable landing pages, graphics and more ready to use – for virtually any market or niche. Point and click to build winning landing pages and pop-ups

Here are some key quotes and points from Shawn Achor’s best selling books Before Happiness and The Happiness Advantage as well as his Ted Talk and interview on Oprah Super Soul Sunday.

Stop waiting for happiness to happen sometime in the future – so many people, workers, parents, students think if they change what is going on in their life or achieve A, B, C then they will be happy.

We think that we have to be successful, then we will be happier. But every time we achieve goals or the brain has a success we always set new goals so the goalposts of what success looks like keep moving and happiness is always on the other side. If happiness is on the other side of success, your brain never gets there. We have pushed happiness over the cognitive horizon as a society.

So “I have to be successful and then I will be happy” is flawed as the real problem is our brains work in the opposite order. If you can raise somebody’s level of positivity in the present, their brain experiences a “happiness advantage”, as your brain when positive performs significantly better than when negative, neutral or stressed (intelligence rises, creativity rises, energy levels rise, productivity levels rise, every business outcome improves). So if we can find a way to become more positive in the present, our brains work even more successfully.

Happiness is a choice – Scientifically, only 10% of our long term levels of happiness are based upon just the external world. 90% is based on how we process the world we find ourselves in. So if we change the lens through which we view the world, we can create greater levels of happiness.

People assume our external world is predictive of happiness. But in reality, even if we know everything about someone’s external world you can only predict 10% of their long term happiness.

The research shows- Being successful doesn’t automatically make you happier. But being happier and being more positive makes you more successful.

Choose your most valuable reality and stop the negative noise – Your brain only has limited resources to think about the world. So if your brain goes first for the negatives, there are less resources to scan the world for things we are grateful for. There are multiple realities that you could construct at every moment. Pick the most valuable reality that will help you be happier and more successful.

On Super Soul Sunday, Oprah talked about giving up the hope that the past could be different. Give up spending your brains resources focused on frustrations about the past, and start using your precious brain resources on how you can create happiness in the present.

2 things cause the human brain to accelerate – seeing the the finish line is close, and seeing how much progress we have made.

In a marathon, people run the fastest (and typically most heart attacks occur) not at the beginning but at 26.1 miles – when people see the finish line they speed up, even though they are in a fatigued state.

So instead of setting large lofty ill defined goals way off in the future, create several short term goals. So instead of trying to lose 15 lbs, just try and exercise 15 mins today. Also when you make a to do list, list some things at the top that you have already achieved. Seeing progress and having the finish line closer speeds us towards that goal.

Review of ZoSocial Viral Facebook Contest Lead Generation Software by Wilco De Kreij

Many of you guys are aware of the enormous potential of Facebook competitions to go viral and collect tons of targeted email leads, the problem is just about everyone, even the big companies like Amazon, are doing it wrong.

Because until now you’ve had two BROKEN options to run contests on Facebook:

So you either use a lead-generating contest that won’t go viral, or a viral contest that won’t get any leads. This is where ZoSocial comes in.

Successful Facebook Developer Wilco De Kreij has been working over the last 6 months on a new strategy that allows you to combine both ways of running contests into one powerful system.

This system basically mixes together the best features of both App Contests and Timeline Contests, allowing you to run automated Facebook Contests that boost engagement and generate 100’s or even 1000’s of likes.

ZoSocial Features:

– Run contests and sweepstakes on your Facebook Pages – so you will get much higher reach when Facebook sees likes, comments and engagement in your page (You won’t be running these contests on a 3rd party app)

– Boost your Facebook Page engagement – so you build more likes and as you may know, more engagement means your fans will see more of your future posts

– Build your email list!

– Send Automatic Notifications to follow up with everyone – including the winners, and possible offering a special offer or discount to everyone else

You guys may remember my friend Wilco de Kreij from the Netherlands who I met at the AffiliatSyd Conference in Australia – Wilco is a well known internet marketer who has helped thousands of people grow their business using Facebook Marketing over the past few years. He’s well known for releasing tools that go far beyond all the usual tools out there, like WP4FB the amazing software for creating Facebook Fan Pages with like-gates, share-gates and more … and I think it’s safe to say he did it again: he just released the most powerful tool to date to get email leads and shares from videos on Facebook.

VideoSkin allows you to add email forms, logos, sharegate features and more INSIDE any YouTube video while it’s playing on Facebook.

It’s a customizable Facebook video player, which means you can add all sort of powerful elements INSIDE any YouTube video while it’s playing on Facebook!

This means that you’ll be able drive traffic, leads and sales right from WITHIN Facebook. Just to give you an idea of what’s possible:

– Brand any video with your logo
– Add powerful call to action online roulette rules
buttons leading directly to your site (no Facebook intervention)
– Collect email addresses right from within the video while it’s playing on FB
– Add popup links (users watches your video and gets a popup window with YOUR website)
– Force viewers to share your video to continue watching the rest of the video
– And much more.

I suggest you guys watch the demo video and see it in action for yourself.

This really is an amazing tool to go viral on Facebook and help you make money and get subscribers at the same time

Basically – VideoSkin turns Facebook into a lead generating magnet…

It allows users to create fully customizable Facebook video players – all the way from simple logos to (timed) email forms, ShareGate features and a whole lot more.

Plus – Every single time someone else shares the video, all the features (e.g. email forms etc) will be included as well.

It’s by far the most powerful tool to date to capitalize on sharing videos on Facebook.

Don’t miss out on this amazing opportunity to get VideoSkin at the Early Bird Discount rate, before he’ll change it into a monthly-service (soon). This is your only chance to get unlimited lifetime access to take your FB marketing to the next level in 2014!

P.S. Do you have an Email List of people running online businesses? I suggest you promote VideoSkin as an JV affiliate, click here to instantly grab your affiliate link and email swipe to cut and paste to your list as it just launched and is a quality product, especially with the huge early bird launch discount it should earn you massive commissions:

I’ve picked this up a few days ago and have been using it ever since – I really love how this tool is getting me Facebook shares, traffic and email leads by using videos on Facebook.

Here is a VIDEO I filmed in London about getting traffic to your blog using Question and Answer sites. Play the video yourself and you will see I added the VideoSkin Sharegate at the 5 second mark so you have to share on your Facebook Wall to continue playing.

Here is another example I have been using with my Facebook Fans for my new Weight Loss / Fitness Book called “Boot the Fat”. I shared this Video and when you see it you can see I used VideoSkin to add the Email Signup form to continue the video after the first 5 seconds:

Clickbank Exchange 2014 is coming up again on January 13, 2014 at the Paris Las Vegas and we have secured a special Clickbank Exchange 2014 Discount for you guys – 50% off, was $597 now only $297 so save $300 if you register now. There are only the last few tickets remaining so hurry as they are almost sold out.

10:30 – 11:20 AM – Pivot your affiliate business to mobile, NOW! (Speaker Peter Hamilton, CEO at HasOffers.com)
Listen to Peter speak to the pivot HasOffers has made to mobile and the wild success plus industry insights that have come with it. Learn about how the ecosystem of performance advertising is evolving from technology, data, collaboration and user experience perspectives and how the world’s best affiliates are already set up for success if they think critically about focusing and pivoting their business.

I met Mark Ling and saw him speak at the ClickBank Exchange in New York City and his site Affilorama and his new course, AffiloBlueprint 3.0 is one of the very best courses out there if you want to learn about affiliate marketing. Mark literally shows you, step-by-step, how he creates the websites that have made him millions of dollars.

Heads up that Mark has just discounted his affiliate course by 50%— but for a limited time only! You need to act fast:

In the past, Mark has actually closed the door early, so it might not be
available for much longer.

Internet marketers have their courses on special all the time,
and I don’t usually care at all, because they aren’t worth it even
when discounted. But normally I tell people to buy AffiloBlueprint
at full price because it is so good.

* It teaches you how Mark Ling creates and markets
his sites so you can do it just like him.
* It teaches you how to beat search engines at their game.
* You’ll learn traffic-generating methods what will blow your mind!
* You’ll get lots of bonuses including Mark Ling’s very own
WordPress theme, which he uses: AffiloTheme.
* Plus TONS more

Dave here – I’ve actually just personally completed my 12 Week Weight Loss Challenge, I entered both the 12 Week BodyBlitz Challenge (by Australian Iron Man and Women’s Health and Fitness Magazines) as well as the Max Challenge aka Max’s Muscle Up 12 Week Challenge so thought I would share some before/after pics and some of the biggest lessons learned that will hopefully help you guys!

Height: 6’0″
BEFORE: 93kg
AFTER: 73kg

Massive congratulations and respect to all the other challengers (particularly my friend and last years winner Guillaume Gebert – who I used to train Hapkido with when I was younger) who have absolutely inspired me and blown me away with their amazing positive attitude!

There were thousands of competitors in the Max Challenge who together lost over 16 tonnes! Even people with 3 kids who had just lost their jobs and could barely afford the supplements and had to get up at 3am to fit in their training, very inspiring!

One Lesson – Take action – start small and build that momentum!

I learned to just start small and take action – it seemed daunting at first to lose all that weight but I found the key was to break it down step by step and take action, as action builds momentum and before you know it the small changes add up. I feel way more positive and confident and this has really sparked me to take control not just of my body and fitness but all areas of life. The idea of not just being a zombie sheep and following the diet and lifestyle habits of society or the people around you, but living consciously and really making a decision to have a goal and a game plan and go for it is truly empowering.

I know many of you guys are into not only improving your business but taking control of your health and fitness as well. So if you have been thinking about getting fit and healthy I really encourage you to take action and go for it!

Over the course of the challenge I timed my runs and measured by weights and performance and I saw first hand which foods and which exercises were having the most positive effects on my body.

Since so many people have asked for advice I have created a new book and program called “Boot the Fat: The Fast, Easy, Science-Based 12 Week Weight Loss Program” and have a Free Report on 5 Science-Based Secrets to Lose Weight Fast and Easy.

Get 5 Science-Based Secrets for Fast, Easy Weight Loss at Boot the Fat

Today Facebook updated its rules for contests and promotions and released their new Facebook Promotion Guidelines which state that you are no longer required to use a 3rd party app to run a competition on Facebook, but that promotions are allowed to be run on a Facebook Pages Timeline, meaning that you can collect entries by having users like a post, comment on a post, or post on your fan page wall. You are also allowed to collect entries by having users message the Page and use likes as a voting mechanism.

Basically before Facebook’s old rules stated that if you wanted to run a competition, it had to be through a 3rd party app like Wildfire or WP4FB and telling users to enter by clicking like or commenting was not allowed. The old rules were BS frankly as they were very inconsistently enforced and most successful contests even by big companies broke all the rules before and completely got away with it. I remember my friend Mandi did a presentation on Facebook Contests at SMX Melbourne and was hard to present a successful case study without the proviso that it was in “the naughty box”, even by well known companies like Westfield and SAS Airlines.

We’ve removed the requirement that promotions on Facebook only be administered through apps. Now, promotions may be administered on Page Timelines and in apps on Facebook. For example, businesses can now:

Collect entries by having users post on the Page or comment/like a Page post

Collect entries by having users message the Page

Utilize likes as a voting mechanism

However you can’t tell people to tag themselves in a photo to enter a competition and Facebook’s updated Page terms prohibit Facebook Pages from “tagging or encouraging people to tag themselves in content that they are not actually depicted in”.

The rules still say that you can’t ask people to enter by liking, sharing, or posting something on their own Personal Profile Timeline (only on your Fan Page timeline). You may remember people posting on their timeline “All I want for Christmas is a $10,000 Westfield Gift Card” which went completely viral – that kind of promotion would still be against Facebook’s terms. This is flawed in my opinion as it is rarely enforced and so many big companies get away with it – though Facebook did say “we may explore enabling this in the future”.

What do you guys think of the changes? Will you still use an app for your promotions or will you try getting users to like or comment on your posts now that it is explicitly allowed by Facebook?

If you want to host your Website with more than 99.994 % average up time with very competitive rate, then 3essentials is the service you need. 3essentials has been in this business for more than ten years, and it has a large base of customers who are happy with the services that 3essentials offers.

However the transfer bandwidth for these plans varies from 200 GB to 700 GB. If you look all these offers seriously and compare with other web hosting plans then you may wonder because 3essentials is really offering great plans with very affordable rates.

3essentials not only offers webhosting, but also it offers various services e.g. virtual servers, virtual desktops tweet adder desktops, Intel servers, remote collocation and custom solutions to all your needs.

I have been getting more and more booty texts lately from people wanting me to come over late at night and have a “hot chocolate” and get advice about “Blogging”, “Affiliate Marketing” or “Online Marketing” for their ecommerce store or business … I can’t take it any more so I am giving it away for free and so are my friends!

To keep everyone satisfied I have teamed up with my friends and colleagues who are the top experts in the world and we are offering our best online marketing books FREE to download on Amazon Kindle from Feb 28th- March 3rd 2013 only!

Consider this your 5 Day Hall Pass with NO catch – you do not even need a Kindle or any software even, you literally just need to click the mouse once with Amazon’s one click checkout and you can read the purchases in your browser instantly right now! All we ask is you be kind enough to leave a quick review at the bottom of the Amazon Product Page if you like the book, even that only takes seconds and less time and effort than sending a booty text! Plus we guarantee these books will satisfy and not leave you frustrated!

Make sure you grab the free downloads NOW while you still can and please spread the word especially to any friends with blogs or online businesses – Invite your friends to the Facebook Event, Share it on your wall, and click the buttons on this post to easily share on Facebook and Twitter!

[Cut and Paste this Facebook Update]:Everyone uses the internet for one thing
So you may as well get it for free …
FREE Business Books on Amazon Kindle – this week only! http://FatCowBusiness.com/FreeBooks

Top Business and Online Marketing Books available FREE as part of the promotion:

The Four Year Old Entrepreneur: 7 Secrets to Making Money with Blogging, Facebook Marketing & Twitter for Business

By Dave Cupples

This book will be free on Fri March 1st and Sun March 3rd, 2013 (Midnight PST = 7pm Sydney Time)

The Four Year Old Entrepreneur is my book (by former NSW Young Entrepreneur of the Year and SMX Idol Winner Dave Cupples) and includes the best of the best from my presentations around the world including at the largest performance marketing conference in Australia (Affili@Syd), Europe (A4uExpo in Munich) and my recent keynote
at the largest Affiliate Marketing Conference in the world, Affiliate Summit in New York City (where I launched this book).

It is packed with the most effective tools and real actionable cutting edge tips including how to spy on & copy competitors, get more Facebook likes, Twitter followers & Email subscribers, secrets to getting shared by influencers & much more! Plus learn why social media fans are like women & how I earned my first $100 at age 4 & learned the most amazing lesson in life.

If you are one of the many people who have asked me for advice about setting up an Affiliate Program – read this book!

I have met and seen just about all the authors in person and seen them speak at Affiliate Summits in New York and Las Vegas – these guys have years of experience and are the top experts in the world on this subject so they know their stuff.

They have put together what is pretty much an encyclopedia on Affiliate Marketing for Merchants. It really is several books put togther in one. Topics convered include how an Affiliate Program works, whether a merchant is ready for an Affiliate Program, basics for an Affiliate Program Agreement as well as good tips for recruiting affiliates and boosting sales with existing affiliates through things like newsletters and seasonal promotions.

My only issue is that listing it for a few dollars on Amazon is absolutely ridiculous – companies out there should be paying thousands of dollars for expert advice like this!

This book is based on a podcast interview with Myself, David Iwanow, Deborah Carney and Vinny O’Hare. I had just
returned from speaking at A4uExpo Europe so had lots of the latest studies and tips for Facebook Marketing, plus my co-hosts have also spoken at the world’s top conferences including Affiliate Summit in New York City and are experts in Facebook Marketing, Email Marketing and Analytics so had some great tips about what really works. Not only do
they have real hands-on experience but more importantly they don’t hold back on sharing and are genuinely helpful to others.

Really useful tips about how to give value first and tips for getting traffic and sales from Facebook.

A discussion about how Affiliate Marketing started, how it has changed and where it is heading from a panel of experts who have been involved since the beginning.

These guys really do know their stuff and are the top experts out there as many have created networks and software since Affiliate Marketing began.

A few tips were that often the smaller networks seem to be faster to bring in new technology, and many agreed that
affiliates in the future must rely less on getting free search traffic from google which is becoming more competitive and really building your own customer base.

They also discussed problems like Google Adwords accounts getting shut down which many affiliates can relate to.

Todd has been one of the leading experts in Affiliate Marketing since the beginning, creating one of the first Affiliate Tracking and Management software solutions in the late 1990s. I saw Todd speak at Affiliate Summit in New York and he not only knows his stuff but is excellent at explaining and helping others.

This book explains all the basics of Affiliate Marketing for beginners, including the different players, things like tracking, types of Affiliates, ways to generate traffic and basically gives you a solid foundation to get started.

The Basics of Affiliate Success: Running a Business (Top Secrets of Successful Affiliate Marketing)

By Billy Kay and Liz Fogg (Editor)

This book will be free from February 27-March 3, 2013

Billy is an industry veteran has been involved in Affiliate Marketing for years and explains the top secrets of Successful
Affiliate Marketing and how to run your sites like a real business.

Choosing the Scope and Structure of Your Blog (ABCs Plus Basics for Websites and Blogs)

By Liz Fogg, Deborah Carney and Tricia Meyer

This book will be free from February 27-March 3, 2013

Great tips about choosing a niche topic for your blog and how to structure your blog. Plus they discuss basics like why
having your own hosted blog and domain running wordpress is best compared to blogger and the free options, something beginners take a while to get their head around!

Includes 2 parts:

Part 1 – Choosing a Niche vs General Blog

Part 2 – How to Structure Your Blog

What is an Affiliate Program and How Does it Work? (Affiliate Marketing Basics from Merchant ABCs)

By Deborah Carney, Vinny O’Hare and Amy Ely (Editor)

This book will be free from February 27-March 3, 2013

These guys have been managing Affiliate Programs for Merchants for years so if you are a merchant looking at different options and want to understand more before starting an Affiliate Program recommend you check this out!

This is a transcript of a podcast discussion and includes some handy discussion about starting an affiliate program,
optimizing your website, comparing in-house tracking vs an affiliate network and various details involved in setting up and running and affiliate program.

Great tips for affiliate coupon sites, including tips for working with merchants for getting sites approved, getting
exclusive coupons and not falling foul of regulations. They also discuss handy tools like the For Me To Coupon Feed and Sharesales Network Deals Database.

SEO For Blogs (ABCs Plus Basics for Websites and Blogs)

By Vinny O’Hare, Eric Nagel, Deborah Carney and Tricia Meyer

This book will be free from February 27-March 3, 2013

Some good quick and actionable tips here to improve your blogs SEO and get more traffic from search results. The guests for this podcast Eric Nagel and Tricia Meyer are very successful affiliates who know their stuff!

The Appendix at the End is really handy! Make sure you check that out as it lists lots of handy tips and plugins, like
Wordpress SEO Plugin by Joost de Valk, Use postname for permalinks in Wordpress, Google XML Sitemaps by Arne Brachhold and links to submit to Google Webmaster Tools.

There are also a whole stack of excellent Art and Photo Books so check those out – plus by leaving a review you can win a print copy of the books!

* Extra Money Answer is available to download on Amazon Kindle FREE for Tuesday 26th Feb and Wed 27th Feb 2013 only so if you get in quick you can download it now for free *

Many friends ask me how to get started in affiliate marketing and how to start a blog or website and Shawn Collins has just released an excellent step by step guide called “Extra Money Answer: How to Create, Promote and Monetize an Affiliate Site” on Amazon Kindle which I highly recommend you check out.

Unfortunately when it comes to creating an online business there is a lot of BS out there by gurus who just hype people into a frenzy in order to sell some get rich system. This book is completely different and is not selling anything but simply designed to genuinely help people with actual step by step tutorials and resources. It is one of the few guides out there I would feel comfortable recommending to friends and family.

Shawn is the co-founder of Affiliate Summit (the world’s largest Affiliate Marketing conference) and has been actually doing this stuff since the 1990s. The books tagline is to provide “a real and honest picture of the opportunities in affiliate marketing” and “how most people don’t make much at all, and that it requires lots of time, testing, and patience”.

This is a really great book for beginners who want to cut the crap and hype and actually learn step by step how to get into affiliate marketing and setup a website, email list, affiliate links and learn the basics of driving traffic.

It is most suited for beginners and goes through different things involved in detail and really goes step by step with actual screenshots of how to set things up using some of the most popular providers.

Some of the topics and tutorials covered in Extra Money Answer include:

– Picking a topic for your site
– Step by Step Guide to setting up your domain, hosting, nameservers and wordpress (with screenshots)
– Email Marketing, including screenshots of how to use Aweber to create an email newsletter, add email signup forms to your site, setup RSS to Email, Email Newsletters and setup email follow-up autoresponder series.
– Creating Social Media Pages like Facebook and Twitter for your site
– Generating Traffic, including using Youtube videos to drive website visitors
– How to find Affiliate Programs
– How to setup Affiliate Links and add them to your site, including a step by step run through example with screenshots using ShareASale (one of the top Affiliate Networks)

5 handy tips from Extra Money Answer:

– Set up Google Alerts to keep track of news and new resources on your topic
– Use the Free WordPress Plugin Pretty Link to create short tracking urls for your affiliate links
– Use Networkedblogs to automatically publish new posts from your blog to Facebook and Twitterfeed to publish new posts to Twitter (I use and recommend these two as well).
– Use KnowEm which enables you to search over 550 social networks and check if your username is available
– Use Paper.li to create an online newspaper from Twitter, Facebook and RSS feeds automatically (I think this is a great way to kick start partnerships with other bloggers where you share each others content). Shawn uses this method to publish a daily newspaper with articles from Affiliate Summit speakers

Even the normal price of $2.99 is extremely cheap considering the hours of work and detailed explanation that has gone in – especially if you are a beginner I would highly recommend you grab this (and leave Shawn a quick review on Amazon too):

We have gathered the Top NFL Super Bowl 2013 Ads for you to watch and vote for below. The NFL Super Bowl 47 Championship is the year’s most watched TV event and according to Forbes, Super Bowl 2013 Ads cost around $4 million for a 30 second commercial. Some of the Top Super Bowl 2013 Ads include Kia, Volkswagen, Godaddy, Doritos, Coke, Mercedes-Benz, Audi, Pepsi Next, Budweiser and Taco Bell.

Studiopress, makers of the Genesis WordPress Theme is having a huge thanksgiving sale for Black Friday and Cyber Monday 2012 and has slashed the prices of their Premium WordPress Theme.

The Genesis Framework by Studiopress has a massive collection of child themes / skins and is the world’s best and most popular WordPress Theme, used by over 50,000 bloggers worldwide including Darren Rowse and Chris Brogan, we use the Genesis Theme here at FatCowBusiness and on many of our other sites as well!

There is no Studiopress coupon code needed but you MUST use this special Studiopress Discount Link and the discount will be applied to each of your purchases:

Get just the Genesis Theme Framework which is normally $59 for $45 after the 25% discount.

Get a mobile responsive Genesis design for less than $20, or get a Genesis / design combo and save $20 (or more).

Recommended – Get a HUGE saving on the Studiopress Pro Plus All Theme Package, which includes Genesis and ALL the different child themes, all 46 current designs, plus every design they make in the future, it is normally $349 which is already an $850 saving if you bought just the current designs all individually. For Cyber Monday only you get a further 25% off the $349 so it comes to $262, the cheapest you will ever get the Studiopress All Themes Package.

Premise normally goes for $165, but during the Studiopress Cyber Monday / Thanksgiving sale, you can get Premise for only $95 (save $70), but you MUST click this link to take advantage of that special price:

Click Frenzy 2012 was touted as “the sale that stops a nation”, a 24 hour online sale in Australia like Black Friday and Cyber Monday in the US, but when the sale began yesterday at 7pm November 20th the Click Frenzy website crashed and went down straight away as up to 2 million Australian Shoppers flooded the site at 7pm.

Leading Australian retailers websites including Myer, Dick Smith, Harvey Norman and David Jones also crashed or slowed. Frustrated Australian shoppers could not access the site for hours and #clickfrenzy, #clickfail and #frenzyfail started trending on twitter. Many big retailers were criticised for their slow websites and lack of big discounts, while the pure play online retailers fared better. Some of the best coupons included an Ezibuy Discount of 60% off, while there were also Styletread Coupon Codes, Surfstitch Coupon Codesand The Iconic Coupon Codes for 25-30% off.

Other Australian retailers offering discounts included Roses Only, Only Online, Deals Direct, Myer, Target, Appliances Online, Dell, Westfield, Kogan, Dan Murphy’s, Bond’s, Clinique, The Good Guys, Ted’s Cameras, MWave and many more. Australian Shoppers who want to catch the remainder of the sale should check out this full list of Click Frenzy 2012 Retailers and Coupons.

The Click Frenzy organizers had promoted the event on many Australian news and TV programs including A Current Affair, The Project and Sunrise, and said they were confident their site would stay up and could handle a million visitors. Many big retailers had reportedly paid up to $30,000 for feature placements on the Click Frenzy site.

Click Frenzy Website Availability (Source: Lost Press Marketing)

Respected industry veteran and Amnesia Razorfish SEO Manager David Iwanow used pingdom to track the Click Frenzy’s website uptime, and found for the first few hours after the sale the Click Frenzy homepage was only available to 13% of visitors. Many others complained on twitter that they couldn’t load beyond the first page.

There was also some smart guerilla marketing and Click Frenzy ambush marketing as marketers jumped on board the trending #clickfrenzy and #clickfail hashtags, like this hilarious Click Frenzy Kit Kat Ad that the company posted on Facebook:

EB Games Australia also posted a pic from Starcraft 2 saying “You call that a #ClickFrenzy? This is a click frenzy”:

While the Click Frenzy organizers and retailers succeeded in building up marketing and hype, many have criticised the failure to deliver and be ready to service the volume on their websites. Many commentators have said this is a good lesson for Australian online retailers to improve and up their game so they can cope with real ecommerce events like Black Friday and Cyber Monday in the US.

What did you guys think of Click Frenzy in Australia? Was the event good for Online Retail in Australia and are Aussie retailers ready for the world stage or where do you think they need to improve? Would love your thoughts and comments:

When it comes to online directories the first names that comes to mind are DMOZ or the Yahoo! Directory, they were the first ones to enter into the market, they are huge. Back then starting our own directory site was very costly and time consuming. A revolutionary plugin for WordPress changed that, a plugin called DirectoryPress can save your time as well as money.
To start your own directory all you need is a domain, hosting, WordPress and the DirectoryPress plugin, that is it you will be able to start your own site within minutes.
You know why I like DirectoryPress? Because of its simplicity as well as amazing design. It really doesn’t matter if you are a programmer or an amateur, at the end you will get a beautiful site with lots of functionality.

DirectoryPress Features:

DirectoryPress comes with 20 different directory layouts which can be used in any niche you are targeting, it is not ending with 20 layouts whenever there is an update you’ll get it for free! If you are not satisfied with the built-in layouts you can also create your own layout.

Worried about how to get traffic to your directory ? No worries then DirectoryPress has all the features you need for on-page SEO, additionally it is also optimized for faster loading and less usage of server memory.

A unique feature that DirectoryPress provides is a thumbnail image API, whenever a user doesn’t upload an image and just enters a website address then the plugin will automatically create a screenshot of the website address and use it as a thumbnail.

Unlimited sites – If you have purchased DirectoryPress once you don’t need to purchase every time you create a new directory, you can use the license for an unlimited time as long as the site is yours, so you can create 1000s of niche directories while paying for one license.

Monetize with Paid Listings – DirectoryPress also has a module to monetize your directory site for paid listings, you can also integrate your custom code with it because you will get the whole code while purchasing it, additionally the developer is very co-operative and provides 24/7 support whenever you stuck with anything.

So overall DirectoryPress is a wonderful plugin for creating niche directories, I would rate my experience 4.9 out of 5 stars for the plugin.

Looking for a great, functional wordpress theme? Our PremiumPress Review talks about some of the functionality and value available when using premium press themes.

The premiumpress range is excellent, with a wide variety of themes available from directory press to shopperpress; premium press is a one stop shop for wordpress themes. The online support is incredibly fast and the community is a great place to find answers to any questions you may have.

Premiumpress themes can be purchased 1 at a time or in a bundle, whichever way you decide to buy; make sure you come back here to pick up your premium press coupon code for even more savings.

Some of the premiumpress themes available include:
– Shopperpress: a great shop front website suitable for affiliate sites as well as for offline businesses. With Shopperpress you can easily build any kind of store you want.
– CouponPress: Looking to put together a coupon site? then this theme is for you.
–DirectoryPress: Whether a local or special interest dircetory you can build a great site with Directory press.
– RealtorPress: Perfect for people setting up an online real estate business
– MoviePress: Allows you to use wordpress as a movie site, upload your own movies or feature your favourites from throughout the web.
– AuctionPress: A great place to start if you want to build your own ebay site.
– CompariPress: Price Comparison Theme, Compare different products, which is best for your customers.
– ClassifiedPress: Job Board Theme: Create a site to post jobs in your niche.
– ResumePress: Online Resume Theme, a site for posting resumes.
– Online Community Theme: Start your own facebook!

Each of the themes are fully customizable and automatically integrate with wordpress, with a premium press theme you can build any kind of website you like. The themes are very well priced and with one of our premiumpress coupon codes you can save even more.
Used by over 10,000 businesses throughout the web, you can rest assured that when using these themes you are using the best wordpress themes available.

Premiumpress themes can be purchased 1 at a time or in a bundle, whichever way you decide to buy make sure you come back here to pick up your premiumpress coupon code for even more savings.

Couponing is just getting bigger and bigger. Perhaps you’ve seen Extreme Couponing on TV? Perhaps you just want a slice of the Affiliate Marketing pie? Whatever your reason for starting an online couponing site, Couponpress is here to help you
Couponpress is a Premium WordPress theme that transforms your original WordPress site into a fully-functional coupon site. Some of the most important features are:

– No Programming Required, Couponpress needs no HTML experience. Simply set up the coupons you wish to list and go. Coupress is designed to make listing your coupons simple and easy.

– No installation limits, so whether you wish to use Couponpress on one site or one thousand, you can. The only limit is what you can imagine.

– No coupon limits, use icoupons, printable coupons or just about any other form of coupons you can think of and you as many of them as you wish. Couponpress can handle unlimited amounts of coupons, in whatever format you like to present them.

– Import from any XML or CSV feed

– Automatic integration with iCodes and ForMeToCoupon coupon feeds

– Support – Couponpress offers 24 hour, 7 days a week full customer service and support. So, if you have questions or concerns, you only need to ask and help will not be far away.

– Customization – Couponpress is 100% open source. So you can customize the theme in any way you like, you can truly make Couponpress look and function exactly as you like it.

Couponpress truly is all you need to create a professional, functional and very attractive coupon site. Couponpress is simple enough to be used by absolute beginners and customizable enough to be attractive to even the most seasoned WordPress professional. So if you’ve been looking for a way to start a coupon business or, even if you have an existing coupon site that you would like to make just that much better, Couponpress is the only theme you will need.

I was inspired to write a review about a web host I recently began to use, Arvixe. The main reason I wanted to write this review is because in the 10+ years that I have been using site hosting services, I have never encountered such an incredibly effective, quick, and really inexpensive host.

I´m paying 4 bucks a month for an ultra fast web hosting for not one, or two but, several of my websites and they even threw in a free domain for me. Yeah, for the rest of my life! That’s already a huge savings for me and with all the other additional features I´m getting, I know that I will be receiving much.. much.. more than what I’m paying for honestly guys! ARVIXE HOSTING IS THE REAL DEAL and dirt cheap!

I was looking around the net to compare other hosting to Arvixe and just to give you an example, most of the other windows hosting plans start out at $8 and some way above that and they don´t even include UNLIMITED bandwith, UNLIMITED disk space, UNLIMITED MySQL databases…. and the connections speeds are extremely fast here! I´m talking fractions of seconds to load webpages and that just means more revenue for me since I know my visitors are not the most patient of web surfers.

Finally, I also had a problem with my database files on one of my sites so I jumped on their live support and spoke to Jenny who was so friendly and helpful! What a breath of fresh air! She literally solved my issue in like 3 steps, which she even placed some screen shots of what I needed to do exactly and without even asking her to do that.

Seriously, I HIGHLY recommend anyone try the Arvixe service out, because if you are like me who has had a lot of experience with many different hosts or even more so if you are just starting out, YOU NEED to check these guys out. Make your life a lot easier and go over to their site right now and check out Arvixe hosting.

I am writing this article to share my wonderful experience as a website administrator since I installed the WPsubscribers wordpress plugin 3 weeks ago to the wordpress websites I administrate. Here are some of the benefits of the WPsubscribers plugin that made my life simpler.
Among its functionalities, the WPsubscribers plugin will ensure that the subscribers will easily register to your website or blog and also subscribe to your content. This will increase the exposure for your content and increase your website follower base. This functionality of the WPsubscribers plugin is achieved by ensuring users are automatically subscribed to your lists upon registration, giving you the option of placing the listing subscription forms anywhere on your website and also the WPsubscribers plugin gives a listing subscription option upon adding a comment in the website content.
The WPsubscribers plugin enable you to add a little bit of style and class to your wordpress website. You have the option of creating pop-ups which will appear to the user when they enter and exit the website. This feature is a brilliant component of the WPsubscribers plugin because it will not only give you extra advertising space; it also has the capability of detecting first time visitors and displays a special message for them.
The WPsubscribers plugin helps you connect with your fans in facebook with the facebook connect options. With the WPsubscribers plugin, you will have the option of adding a facebook connect button which when clicked, the user will be able to connect with you and automatically they are added to your mailing list.
With the WPsubscribers plugin, you will have the capability of creating an unlimited number of subscription forms. These subscription forms include custom forms, popup forms and also exit forms. The benefit of this feature of the WPsubscribers plugin is the ability to have unique content for each form and the ability to use them separately; including embedding of the forms to your content. This will include adding sign up forms at the end of a post and chances are that if a user likes your post, they will not mind signing up and receive such other posts directly to their mailbox.
In conclusion, the WPsubscribers plugin has literally combined all other list building and user management plugins and combined them to one perfect plugin that not only helps you manage your users; it also helps increase the number of subscriptions and exposure your content has.

WP Zon Builder is a WordPress plugin which helps in making niche Amazon Affiliate sites very quickly, when I was testing the plugin for my personal use I found that it is very easy and simple to make a niche site with the WP Zon Builder plugin.
I have personally created several sites with it, it comes with lots of features that you may not even imagine to have with a WordPress plugin. One great feature I’ve found with the WP Zon Builder is that you can set your post dates in the past, another feature I found is important is if Amazon updates the product data then you don’t need to go manually and update the post but there is a readily available option on the setting page through which WP Zon Builder will automatically update the data in the post as per the changes on Amazon.
The best thing I found in the plugin is it provides click reports on how many clicks on which product are made by whom at which time, all these details are provided in a clear way and you can also export them to an excel file.
A beautiful feature that will increase the CTR (click through rate) in search engines is the Rich Snippets for star ratings, when people search for the product in the Google then with the help of this plugin a star rating will be displayed which is very good for catching eyeballs and resulting in more traffic. The plugin can also be integrated with any WordPress themes easily.
WP Zon Builder also provides support for clean URLs which are very SEO friendly.
Overall WP Zon Builder is a wonderful product and I give 4.5 out of 5 stars. It is very user-friendly and has very good support from the developer. If you are planning to start an Amazon review site then you must try the WP Zon Builder WordPress Amazon Plugin. It will save you lots of time and energy, you can create an Amazon niche site within 2 hours with this plugin.

Commission Factory are a new Australian Affiliate Network with a very clean and nice interface and an impressive list of clients including The Iconic, Styletread, BrandsExclusive and more Australian Affiliate programs.

They have recently hired a full time Affiliate Manager from the UK to help recruit affiliates and grow your program so they charge $99-$149 a month now. There are no setup fees just that monthly fee and they take a 25% fee of what you pay each affiliate per transaction.

Gangnam Style is a 2012 K-pop dance single by Korean Pop Singer Park Jae Sung, better known as Psy. The song and its entertaining music video was released on July 5 2012 and quickly went viral, surpassing Carly Rae Jepsen’s “Call Me Maybe” to reach the number one position on the Youtube Top 100 Music Videos chart at the end of August. As of early October Gangnam Style has over 375 million views on Youtube making it one of the Top Ten most watched youtube videos of all time. It has also spawned numerous Gangnam Style Memes, Parodies and copycat dance videos on youtube, many of which have got millions of views themselves.

Why is Gangnam Style so popular and what made the Gangnam Style youtube video so famous?

Mitt Romney Gangnam Style Dance on Jay Leno (watch the video below)

The song chorus is very simple and catchy, but many people believe Gangnam Style has become so popular due to the Gangnam Style Invisible Horse riding signature move which is very easy, funny and entertaining when replicated by someone else.

I believe the Gangnam Style Parodies and Spoof videos have played a tremendous role is making the video go viral and reach a new audience. Copying the dance move and making spoof videos is something which gets other people involved in the processs of sharing and creation, which is the key to unlocking the real viral potential of social media.

Gangnam Style Marketing Lesson 1 – The power of leveraging other people in Social Media: How Spoofs, Parodies and Memes can spread content to an entirely new audience

In my recent speeches and new book The Four Year Old Entrepreneur, one of the key secrets of social media I explain is connecting, partnering and leveraging off other people.

Think about it – simply broadcasting a fixed message will only go so far. But in this Age of Creation that we are seeing with Social Media, your audience now has an audience, and it is so easy for anyone to create content and share to all of their friends. People want to share and support what they create and what they are a part of. So when other people can get involved, and create their own spin on the original content, they spread the content to their friends and the content grows wings.

Something which can inspire other people to create content and put their spin on it, such as memes, covers, parodies and spoofs, means that the content can grow and grow and take on a life of its own.

When you can allow other people to take part and get involved your content reaches a whole new audience.I think this has been a key factor why Gangnam Style has expanded beyond a Korean Pop Video to the Western world due to all the spoof videos.

So the real key today is not about broadcasting your content or message by yourself, but creating an environment and facilitating groups of people to get involved, gather and share.

Like most people, the first I heard of Gangnam Style was not by seeing the original Korean video, but by seeing a parody video – actually the Gangnam Style Big Brother Australia Video (below). Similarly, the first time many of my American friends heard of Gangnam Style was through seeing the Mitt Romney Gangnam Style Dance at Republican National Convention on Jay Leno.

Mitt Romney Gangnam Style Dance on Tonight Show by Jay Leno 강남스타일

Many people after seeing these spoofs then search google and youtube and watch Psy’s original Gangnam Style video. So these parodies have meant Gangnam Style has been exposed to an entirely new audience.

Best Gangnam Style Parody Videos

Gangnam Style and it’s signature horse riding dance move has inspired so many memes, spoofs and parody videos. Here are some of the Top Gangnam Style Parody Videos:

Gangnam Style Marketing Lesson 2 – The power of trending topics and putting your spin to ride the wave

It’s not just the 375 million plus views the original has generated. Look at the millions of views all of these parody videos have.

Another key lesson from my book and speeches that I always tell businesses is to give people what they want and produce content on topics that are in demand. Especially when blogging, making videos or trying to get PR and media, a great trick is to find a trending topic that everyone is already talking about and putting your spin on it.

The millions of views all the Gangam Style spoof and parody videos are getting shows you powerful it is when you put your spin on a trending topic.

Google Trends Search Volume for Gangnam Style

Say you were a dancer or instructor, what dance move is more in demand right now than the Gangnam Style signature horse riding move? Also aspiring musicians who put their cover recordings of Gangnam Style and even Call Me Maybe get amazing amounts of traffic and exposure – I have seen so many cover recordings on Youtube by unknown artists getting millions of views. That shows you the amazing power of giving people what they want and creating content by putting your spin on a hot trending topic that everybody is talking about and that is in hot demand.

This Gangnam Style Video with all those views would likely have made over $1 million dollars from the Youtube Partner Program alone. What is so exciting is that in this age of social media, anyone can start their own blog or youtube channel. Make sure you check out my free Step by Step Guide to Making Money Blogging, plus get my videos and presentations from around the world, plus a special bonus guide to Making Money with Youtube by joining free here.

Social Media website Myspace has launched a completely revamped version with new design and layout called “the New Myspace”. Watch the new MySpace Preview Video / Introduction to the new myspace video called “This is Myspace” here:

MySpace has been the butt of jokes for almost five years after being bought www.youtubemp3now.com/nl for US$580 million by News Corporation and sold 6 years later for US$35 million, but new investors like pop star Justin Timberlake and Chris and Tim Vanderhook, who bought MySpace in July 2011, are hoping Myspace can make a comeback.

The new Myspace design and layout now focuses on emerging artists hoping to be discovered. According to the site itself, “the new Myspace is the social and music discovery destination powered by the passion of fans. Music, videos, photos, and TV, made social.”

The new myspace design and new myspace layout indeed looks beautiful, like the popular Windows 8 and Windows Media Player interface crossed with Pinterest (which was a huge hit). There are bordered tiles, high resolution images, timeline seems to scroll horizonatally, users can log in with Facebook or Twitter and import photos across and status updates look similar to the mobile app Path.

A major focus of the new Myspace is music – artists can communicate with their fans, and fans can browse popular artists and albums. I think the focus on music artists is a smart move as music artists have always been MySpaces’ strength and singers and songwriters especially are the top influencers and trend settings in the social media world. Any list of the biggest accounts on Twitter and Facebook with the most followers is topped by musicians and artists like Lady Gaga and Justin Bieber. You can request an invite to the new myspace by going to new.myspace.com

What do you think of the new myspace? Can Justin Timberlake and the new owners bring back Myspace or is Myspace dead?

Digital Performance Group (ASX:DIG) has announced it will acquire Australia’s second largest Affiliate Network Viva9 / Commission Monster and merge it with it’s own number one network DGM Australia

Digital Performance Group Managing Director Chris Meehan said of the takeover “dgm and Viva9 have been the leaders in the Australian affiliate market for the past nine years and together have worked with the majority of finance, retail and telco advertisers, investing marketing dollars via affiliate networks in Australia and New Zealand.”

After the merger DPG’s Email Direct Marketing business Empowered Communications will be boosted with it’s email database growing from 500,000 to 600,000 net after duplicates.

Commission Monster Affiliates only recently had to update all their links to the new Commission Monster hasoffers platform and will have to update links again.

Both DGM and Viva9 have confirmed that Commission Monster campaigns and links will be updated and moved across to the dgmPerformance platform and affiliates will need to transfer links across to dgmPerformance tracking eventually.

DPG / DGM has cited that the acquisition will result in an immediate uplift in earnings with significant ongoing synergies.

What do you guys think of the DGM and Viva9 acquisition? Will the merger of the No 1 and 2 largest Affiliate Networks in Australia help grow the Australian Affiliate industry or will it result in less competition and less competitive payouts for affiliates?

WOW I am in awe of what these awesome peeps are doing for charity so this has been one of the coolest things I have been involved in. For those not in the loop, I was lucky enough to be Keynote Speaker at Affiliate Summit in New York City a few weeks ago so I used the opportunity to officially launch DonateSponsor.org, the world’s first Charity Fundraising Social Network in honour of my twin and close cousin Jim (watch the video and DonateSponsor dares/shenanigans in the last 10 mins from 39.29 here):

We had a charity auction to wear a company’s t-shirt in exchange for a donation http://www.casinoin.us/ to charity – big thanks to Thomas Dietzel from CPAWay and Incentivize.com who came on board straight away with a $1500 donation. People were invited to submit any official fundraising pages from any government registered charity to DonateSponsor.org and the $1500 donation would be donated via the Top 10 Fundraising Pages that had got the most votes by the end of August.

Many great causes were posted and many of the top finishers actively posted to their followers for votes which helped everyone and brought even more people to join the DonateSponsor community so big thanks to everyone who submitted and voted for all your support.

We had some very cool incentives and dares offered to encourage donations, such as Missy’s competition to win a Nexus 7, Vinny offering backlinks from his websites, I dared to plank on stage in my Affiliate Summit Keynote and Steph dared to bust out in the middle of the keynote as Wonder Woman!

P.S. We are seeking more business sponsors to come on board for this month, which involves pledging a donation direct to charity (that will go to the Top Fundraising Pages with the most votes at the end of the month) and we give your business a blog post and featured sidebar links from DonateSponsor.org which is now getting thousands of visitors a month, as well as posts to all our Email, Facebook and Twitter followers. Contact us or email dave ‘at’ fatcowbusiness.com and let us know the maximum donation you would be willing to offer.

Tips and Quotes from Seek Australia Co-Founder Matt Rockman’s presentation at the Young Entrepreneurs’ Unconvention in Sydney in September 2012 #uncon.

Started Seek in 1997

Lost $26m before they made a profit

Listed on ASX in 2005 for market capitalization of $500m, in 2012 now worth $2.2bn

In terms of market penetration, the largest online employment business anywhere in the world

They were not first to market – 3 of the big players were there before – Monster.com and all the big newspapers including Fairfax and News Limited

Big newspapers and media players had all but locked in the classified market … but the internet presented a once in a generation opportunity to break the lock

6 key learnings:

1) Be Bold

Go slightly further out on the risk curve

Seek used TV, Radio, outdoor – newspapers would not let them advertise

They got big creative genius Ted Horton on board and had to spend their whole budget, made TV ads featuring Alan Bond, about seeking a new beginning. Ads were a huge success and traffic went through the roof. Started a snowball effect – more visitors, which means they get more ads, and around goes the cycle. Were a small startup but as soon as you are on TV people think you are legitimate.

2) Be Patient

Revenue grew 20x over 8 years. Spent first 2 years with no revenue by giving away ads to get traction. Matt says get adoption, get users, then revenue will come followed by profit

3) Be courageous

When hiring – take a chance if person has that something special and when making promotions. Don’t play it safe

4) Be Special

Be unique – have culture. People leave giant companies for the culture at startups. Things like parental leave, bringing kids to work they had at Seek in 1997

Matt says – give me a great team in a crap market, rather than a crap team in a great market any day of the week

For notes from the other sessions at the Young Entrepreneurs’ Unconvention Sydney and other conferences around the world including Affiliate Summit and Clickbank Exchange in New York join our newsletter here.

Some thoughts from PayPal Seed Investor Peter Davison’s presentation at the Young Entrepreneurs’ Unconvention in Sydney in September 2012 #uncon. (Blog posts with notes from the other sessions coming up).

Peter Davison was a venture capital seed funder of PayPal in much the same way that one of PayPal’s founders Peter Thiel went on to be a seed funder of Facebook as shown in a scene in the movie “The Social Network”.

Becoming an entrepreneur is not a rational decision, it is something where you cannot live with yourself if you don’t follow the dream

You need to be an independent thinker. You need to be engaging with people and processing it for yourself.

There are no strict answers as an Entrepreneur- have people around to validate and question you

Story of WinAmp Founder Justin Frankel and the WinAmp AOL Takeover

Story of a kid Justin Frankel in Sedona, Arizona who created the mp3 software player WinAmp. Peter flew to Sedona, AZ to meet this 19 year old kid. Peter goes to the house and this kid is asleep when he arrives and answers the door in buddweiser slippers. He offered the company to them for $50,000. His Dad said sell – pay off your college fees. But they didn’t accept this deal and missed out. 12 months later, Winamp sold to AOL for $80 million.

Peter points out that firstly, you may not need us investors

Core things Angel Investors / VCs look at:

– First thing – your ability to persuade other people

– Evidence – how well you are doing so far, what traction do you have

– Movitation – why are you talking to me?

Peter says when pitching to an investor – “you need to be taking me on your journey. Don’t come for validation from me. You need to be the leader, we are just an enabler” and “we are back seat drivers man”

Greatest attribute of an entrepreneur – ability to creatively respond to challenge. To take an impossible task and turn it into something positive.

Jack Delosa adds – Failure is an inevitable part of success, he just wanted to get the failures out of the way

Peter Davison says – you get more reward out of helping people than from money, it is a deeper level of happiness

Final tip – get out there and let the customers validate

Gives the example of a man who put leaflets in letterboxes around Wellington, asking would you be willing to buy milk for $X? Just an expression of interest. After collecting all that info he went and bought the nearby dairy farm

Hey guys – here are my notes from Jack Delosa from The Entourage’s presentation “The 7 Drivers of Entrepreneurial Success” at the Young Entrepreneurs’ Unconvention in Sydney in September 2012 #uncon. (Blog posts with notes from the other sessions are coming up)

Challenges of a startup business:

– Insight – about the market, we don’t have that at the start, success for a start up business isn’t about how much money you make but getting this insight

– Leverage – as an early stage you will thrive or die based on how many people you reach, convert. How do we do more with less

– Education – vast majority of early stage businesses do not actively seek mentors, advisers, education. You can leverage someone with 10 years of experience, so much leverage in education

In business there is a formula, that is why Branson can go into any industry and spit out successful businesses in just about any space in the world.

Most people learn through trial and error. The problem is the lesson always comes after the mistake.

7 Drivers of Entrepreneurial Success:

1) Lean startup – we need to become masters of learning quickly, discover quickly what works and what doesn’t

2) Branding – we need to master branding as a skill, develop a brand that compels people to do business with you

3) Business Development – create leveraged ways of generating business including strategic partnerships and PR strategies

4) Online strategy:

– How do we drive more traffic to our website?

– How do we convert more traffic once it gets to our website

– How do we automate that process as much as possible?

5) Systemisation – implement efficient management that enables growth

6) Capital Raising & Acquisition – how do we leverage off other peoples money to accelerate the growth of our business

Siimon Reynolds says – No. 1 difference between good companies and great companies is that the leaders of great companies have a long term perspective

Startup business – temporary organism designed to find a viable business model

You will fail just about everything you try the first time. No.1 thing you need to do is fail and fail fast – as if you fail slow you will be gone before you can learn

Businesses fail because they didn’t get the insight fast enough and that killed them

Need to determine as quickly as possible what you can do to make the business work

Strategic Partnership

Win/win relationship with a complimentary company designed to drive us business on a continual basis

E.g. McDonalds and Disney – with happy meals, not competing but same target market, McDonalds supplies the food and usually the toys are from Disney

Ask questions:

1) Where do my clients go before they buy my product?

2) Where do my clients go after they buy my product?

3) Who targets the same market but offers a different product or service?

Find:

1) Complimentary Business

2) Compelling Reason for them to send out your offer

3) Compelling offer

The world has moved on from interruption marketing, stop and look at this, we are now in an era of permission / relationship marketing

So compelling offer needs to be a no-brainer of a deal, usually free

Entourage is working with ANZ – ANZ sends out an email to their 120,000 small business clients every time they run an unconvention

ANZ’s reputation rubs off, that business is marketing on their behalf continually

E.g. Greg Stark, Better Being Personal Training – Personal Trainer created relationships with Lorna Jane and all these brands and grew by 300% in a year

Next challenge in business – systems

As your business progresses in the growth curve, your day to day involvement should decrease

If everything that needs to happen needs to come through you then you are the bottleneck and you are preventing the business from growing

No 1. goal should be to build a business that works without you

Because we want to work when we want to rather than when we have to

Make instructions:

– What

– Why

– Who – use positions, not names which come and go

– When – when this trigger happens, do this task

– How – Use Jing screenshot recording software which enables you to film a portion of the screen while you film the computer. E.g. This is how you send an email to the database

People raise capital for 2 reasons usually:

1) Looking to accelerate growth and increase demand

2) To facilitate existing growth

Growth devours cash

$1 billion was invested into small businesses by Angel Investors in 2010, average transaction size $200,000 so 5000 businesses

22% of Australian Business owners now aged over 60, about to lose hundreds of thousands of businesses and no-one is there to take them up

3 questions on every investors mind:

Most people when pitching us as investors answer question 3 first which is a dealbreaker

1) Will I lose my money? First thing they are looking at as risk:

In combating risk, looking at:

– Experience of the entrepreneur, and if you are young the experience of your advisors that you have around you

– Proof of concept – does not have to be making profit, can be consumer insight, we have spoken with consumers and facts, stats, Google insights and stats help prove the concept

2) When will I get my money back?

Is there an exit strategy? How committed is the entrepreneur to the exit strategy?

3) Will I make money?

First thing you need to do is lower buyers resistance, then heighten buyers acceptance

– What are the growth opportunities for this business?

– Who might buy this business?

– Is there strategic value in this business, could this business be worth more to someone else than to us? E.g. Instagram $1 billion sale but no money made

Young Electrician – Bought another business with $110,000 profit a year selling for $110,000, negotiated for $90,000. This multiple is cheap, businesses in Australia sell for only 2x profit multiple.

Success Stories:

– How does Janine Ellis go from starting Boost Juice as a mother and selling 65% for $65 million in 10 years

– How does Spreets sell for $40 million in only 10 months?

– Richard Branson invested $10 million only into Virgin Blue in Australia. Virgin followed a similar formula to Boost, floated on ASX 3 years after they started. Floated business for $2.3bn – Richard had 29.6%

Business is a team sport. No 1 thing Jack says he got right early on – “was surrounded myself with people that were smarter than I am”

Hey guys – here are my notes from Sarah Riegelhuth’s presentation at the Young Entrepreneurs’ Unconvention in Sydney in September 2012 #uncon. (Blog posts with notes from the other sessions by Jack Delosa, Peter Davison, Matt Rockman are coming up)

Sarah Riegelhuth @SarahRiegelhuth is co-founder of Wealth Enhancers, is the youngest Board Member in the history of the Association of Financial Advisers and also co-founder of the League of Extraordinary Women.

Here are some top tips from the session including tips for Media and PR, Business Awards, Cloud Accounting, Cloud Apps, Project Management and Systemizing your Business and Processes:

Find your edge – what makes you stand out from the crowd?

“Failure is simply the opportunity to try again, this time, more intelligently” – Henry Ford

Take the best from all of your competitors and build that into your model

Dealt with young clients – most financial advisers target retirees

Tips for Business Awards

Look for awards in your industry to start off with, then more broader like Telstra Business Awards. Tip about awards – Sarah was a judge and said they had to mark every single question with a score out of 10, each of the quesitons were marked in isolation. So someone would have a great award application but put one liners for some questions, so you need to give every question as much effort as the other questions.

Crucial to have systems and processes

As you have to do anything in your business, pretend you have to train 10 people to do that, pretend you are bigger than you are. The earlier you can systemize the better. They had staff turnover last year and realized their systems were not tight enough – they were losing knowledge with staff turnover. Even start with a word document on 5 steps to do X, then when you have new staff members ask them to try the document and see if they can do it better.

Their whole entire business is on workflow tasks, they use financial management software, use various cloud computing tools to have everyone communicating in one place

Moved into new office, completely hot desk, got rid of filing cabinets

Create culture of being able to adapt quickly and change

They moved everything to cloud – no more outlook, everything to Gmail. Otherwise they would have to pass around the laptop and say look at Sarah’s email etc.

Being a leader is about inspiring people on a continual basis. Manage systems, lead people.

Measure everything you are doing, as if you are not measuring you are not accountable.

Matt Barrie from Freelancer said when they added that “completion” bar to profiles the amount of people filling up all that missing info in their profiles jumped 80%, just because they didn’t want it to show incomplete in that bar

“Ideas won’t keep. Something must be done about them” Alfred North Whitehead

Made an acquisition last year that doubled the size of their business, went into $1 million of debt to do it, but says best thing they ever did

Curse of the entrepreneur is so many ideas and opportunities, but can’t do everything, have to have goals and do focused, have to think if I am true to myself is that going to get me to my goal?

Rather be doing 1-2 things at 100% then lots of things half assed

Know the numbers – if you don’t take responsibility for knowing exactly where you sit financially you are digging your own hole

Online Cloud Accounting Software:

– Xero – They use xero accounting software, switched over on the first of July, says it is way easier and has been a godsend. They hook up to datafeeds and your online banking, so do these other options:

If you are small – do the bookkeeping yourself, if you can do it for a little while and get your head around it you will benefit when you outsource it later, keep up to date, not just “I’ll deal with it at the end of the year”

The power of focus and vision – 10% mindset, there are always a million things on your list to do, that goal – “the 100%” just keeps getting bigger. No matter how much you do you still feel like you are 10% of the way of your journey, the moment you feel like you are at the end is probably when you need to move on as that is probably when the passion is gone

As an entrepreneur, need to get used to the feeling that you are never going to be “finished”

Mark Ling (creator of Affiliorama and one of Clickbank’s highest selling product vendors and affiliates with millions of dollars in sales) did a great session on Webinars and Autowebinars at Clickbank Exchange 2012 in New York. Here are my top tips from Mark’s session:

Use the 7 deadly sins:

Lust – With the incredible female seductive system, you’ll discover …

How to be the guy who naturally triggers unstoppable sexual attraction in women. You’ll be the guy she fantasizes about and can’t keep her hands off

You can also play the lust card when selling other products like weight loss or making money online e.g. with your ripped body and riches you will have the opposite sex lining up

Greed – make money product. You will have several hot gorgeous women texting you, flirting with you and wanting to go out on dates with you.

Glutton – people want to eat and consume without worrying about the consequences, yes you can have your cake and eat it too

Sloth – people like to be lazy. If you don’t like going out in order to meet new women, it doesn’t matter, you can get dates by sitting on a coach on your computer.

Wrath – angry with your ex? Did they do something nasty like cheat on you? Get the ultimate revenge by dating a better, hotter woman than them … even weight loss say get the body you deserve and have your ex parter totally regret leaving you

Envy – I have to warn you, your friends will be jealous of you

Proud – you’ll be able to walk down the street with pride knowing you’ve got this area of your life sorted once and for all

The Close

You can put bonuses in first then do the price drop

$5744 value per jetpack, but you are getting 5 jetpacks

First price drop … say for a limited time $497

Sell the money back guarantee – remove the risk to them

Then add in a couple of really appealing bonuses, make sure you show product images and give them a dollar value if possible

2nd price drop – this makes the webinar price now lower than the regular price on your website, plus add in some additional bonuses that aren’t featured on the regular sales page for the product

Scarcity – like for the next 10 mins only, you want them to buy right then

Display the call to action on screen. Give a time limit. Take Q and A. Read out the first names of the people that have joined for social proof. Offer a prize for people that join within the first 10 minutes, maybe a Kindle Fire.

Pace the bonuses out – don’t give them all at once.

After the 10 minutes, add a couple more bonuses and try to close again

If you tell people at any stage there will be a replay, you get a lot more drop offs

Variations on the close – Mark prefers time based limit, you could have a limited quantity of products available and keep counting down how many are left

Sign up page Tips

– have a strong engaging headline “The bitter truth about men and how to have him love you more”

– include at least 4-5 bullet points containing the main benefits people will gain out of being on your webinar

Remind people of the space limit of your webinar – e.g. GoToWebinar limits to 1000

3 big providers of automated webinar software

– Evergreen business system

– Auto webinar player

– Stealth seminar

When you run an automated webinar, recommend: 11am, 3pm, 6pm, 9pm

Evergreen Business system – can make it in the users time zone

To promote webinars as an affiliate or if you have an automated webinar that converts well, check out Mark’s site hugeconversions.com

Dave here … just chilling in LAX Airport at Starbucks while waiting for my flight back to Sydney. Just getting together my notes from seeing Joe Polish’s session at Clickbank Exchange 2012 in New York. Joe is a cool guy who has made tens of millions of dollars online and runs the Genius Network Mastermind Club (a $25,000 a year coaching club) and commands over $25,000 for half a day of private consulting.

Here are my top tips from his session:

People love to be sold, when you are in an environment where someone is educating you and giving you what you want, that is enjoyable.

If you have told someone else about a book, restaurant or movie you liked and they went and saw it, that is a sale.

You can solve any problem in the world with the right sales letter – the sales letter is the most important thing you need for what you are selling

How well do you attract people with what you are saying and how you are saying it? How to can, clone and replicate that is the key to growing your business

20 years ago Joe was dead broke, 6 years before that was a drug addict, 105lbs at age 18

Marketing is applied psychology – the study of human behaviour

You want to enter a conversation which is existing in your prospects mind

Be nice to the people you meet on the way up, they are going to be the same people you meet on the way down

Entrepreneur – person who takes resources from a lower level of productivity to a higher level. Leave people better off than before they met you, keep making things better

The magic rapport formula

The best way to help the poor is to not be one of them

Most people who cannot learn a skill – it’s their mindset that they go into it thinking that it is a bad thing

How to get people to do what you want them to do?

Figure out what they want, give it to them, and then they will give you want you want

1) Focus on how you will help them … or reduce their “suffering”

Joe says – one of the worst things someone can do is come up to him and say “I have this idea we can make money”.

2) Invest time, money and energy on relationships

Be a fountain not a drain

3) Be the type of person they would “always” answer the phone for

Why do you send someone to voicemail? When they are a drain, when they are a taker not a giver, make sure you’re not that person that when you call

4) Be useful, greatful and valuable

5) Treat others as you would love to be treated

6) Avoid formalities, be fun and memorable, not boring

If you want to gauge the value of a relationship – it’s how often you laugh with the other person

7) Appreciate people

8) Give value on the spot – if you know the answer to somebody, really go out of your way

9) Get as close to in-person as you can

Action Steps (from Dan Sullivan)

The refer-ability habits

1. Show up on time

2. Do what you say

3. Finish what you start

4. Say please and thank you

We all know people that are super talented but we can’t refer people because they don’t meet these refer-ability habits

Go for Premium Price

Joe has sold marketing kits from $497 – $1700 to $1000 a month coaching programs

Philosophy – charge a lot of money for my very best stuff, and the rest of it I will give away for free

Build a platform where the customers ask “can we please buy something?”

If everybody bought by price … everybody would drive a Kia

4 M’s in business – Marketing, Management, Margins, Model

Raise your prices and three things will happen:

1. Your sales will go up
2. Your sales will go down
3. Your sales will stay the same

Larry Steinman’s book – how to sell at prices higher than your competitors. If the average carpet cleaner raised their prices 10%, they could lose as much as 40% of their business and still maintain the same bottom line profits

People in the $25,000 group are much easier to deal with than the $25 client

The only thing worse than no sale is an unprofitable sale. In 1992 Joe was a carpet cleaner – he was actually PAYING money to go and clean carpets 12hrs a day

Most if not all price resistance is in the minds of the seller and not the buyer

Marketing is about positioning – so they are pre-disposed to buy and deal with you

Reasons why you don’t want to mess with price buyers

– they take up your sales time
– they do all the complaining
– they forget to pay you
– they tell other people how little they paid you
– they drive off your good prospects and customers
– they’re not going to buy from you again anyhow
– they’ll require you to “invest up” to supply their needs – and then they’ll blackmail you for yet a lower price
– they’ll destroy the credibility of your price and your service in the eyes of your clients
– they will steal any ideas, information and knowledge they can get their hands on

When someone pays more than $100 to buy a watch, they are not buying a watch, they are buying jewellery

To find influencers in your niche, one great tool is Followerwonk – just make sure you spell that URL correctly when typing it in! FollowerWonk allows you to search words in a person’s twitter bio like “journalist” or “internet marketer” and you can see how many followers they have.

Another awesome tool is Klout which measures influence and reach, and gives a score based on not just how many followers someone has, but how many retweets, mentions, how well connected they are and whether they can start trends and influence the right people. Justin Bieber has an army of loyal followers, as well as being homies with Usher, singing for Obama then hooking up with Kim Kardashian at the White House, so he gets 100.

A great tool to find influential people on Twitter is WeFollow – this lists the top influencers tagged in each category like “internetmarketing”, “photography”, “wine”, “football” and many more.

So get out there and start assembling a list of say 10 top blogs, Facebook Pages and Twitter accounts in your niche market. Go and comment on each of those blogs, retweet their stuff, start engaging these people and giving value first and you will find people that will engage with you back. Also when you comment you are allowed to enter your blogs URL and especially if you are adding insightful comments, people will click through to your site to find out more. Likewise you can comment on other Facebook Fan Pages as your Facebook Fan Page, and again if you are leaving helpful comments which show your expertise you will get people clicking through and coming to your fan page.
Also mentioning and linking to other Facebook Fan Pages in your updates, and mentioning high traffic Twitter accounts in your tweets can also lead to a bump in your followers, especially if those high follower accounts reply and tag you back.

1) Goals – Always know what your goals are, what do you want it to do for your business

2) Audience – Also which exact audience are you going for?

3) Unique Value Proposition – your unique value proposition – what makes you different and what makes you stand out from your competitors?

Jen – figure out unique and creative ways to integrate affiliate offers, it’s not just about adding a link or banner to your site

Trisha – like to focus on working smarter not harder, likes tools like if this then that – ifttt.com. Can create things like when you star something in Google reader it goes to evernote or dropbox. Plugin called Post Template for WordPress (by Vincent Pratt) – to create a lot of different templates esp if you are writing the same type of posts over and over again

E.g. Eating out in Restaurants, could focus on child friendly restaurants in a specific area or cities you travel to where you take your kids.

Hyper targeting a local audience – Todd says need to focus as can’t possibly cover all the restaurants out there. Goal is for other people “like me”, unique value proposition – maybe you are hilarious and film with a video camera, your voice and what you have to say is your UVP. You need to provide value – focusing on helping other people. Participate in Yelp, Google Pages, Plus.

Think about a very specific issue or question that your audience would have – what they would type into search engines – and you answer it. And title your article that question. You can receive search rankings from just answering a simply specific question for your audience.

Jen – start commenting on other sites and build up a following

Todd – tip does your domain name clearly imply or express your UVP – what is it they are going to get out of this website. Like localkidfriendlyrestaurants.com

Trisha – can use something like pinerly to track re-pins on pinterest

Todd – your website is your product, focus hard core on your content

People ask how often can I mail to my email list? Todd says only you know your audience, answer is different for every type of business or website

Have an awesome amazing about page. A lot of time if you look at analytics when people hit your site they go to your about page, that is your chance to sell them on you

Daniel – the about page is the one you want to go crazy on, make it big, bold and put yourself out there. Even add audio and a video.

Todd – in your content, use proper headings, if you have 10 paragraphs, find a way to summarize 2 paragraph chunks and put subtitles, as people skim though

Jen – will sometimes bold the first sentence

Someone asked a question about how often to email. Todd – you want to set expectations with your audience. Before you ever try to sell anybody anything, build rapport and a relationship first. The first several messages should focus on adding new amazing value to this new subscriber.

Todd – said don’t worry or get down about unsubscribes – if they don’t want to hear from you they are not your target audience

Plugin that replicates wordpress installations – backup creator. You can make a website and put all your favourite plugins, put all the settings, then copy and use it as a template for new websites.

Jen – photos of people would be better than a logo for most blogs, logo makes it look too impersonal like a business. Branding doesn’t always mean it has to be a logo, can be your colour scheme that you use. Jen says in case you don’t know – don’t just grab images from other websites even if you give them credit.

Trisha says favicon.com has lots of great pictures to use. Jen says can use clipart.com to get rights. Can try flickr or google searches with creative commons rights but probably best not to use those for personal branding.

Todd – says fiverr.com is great specifically for photoshop help (Agree, I have been using it lots for that too)

Example – Kickboxing. You could focus on local – like local places to learn kickboxing, could do kickboxing equipment and reviews, tips on how to find a good kickboxing class, books and videos on kickboxing, you could be the number 1 affiliate to sell Jean Claude Van Damme merchandise etc.

Jen – quickest way to get a youtube video ranked. Submit the video to other resources outside of you and get them to link back to your youtube video

Todd mentioned the ViewBix tool where you can put youtube videos on your site and add call to actions during and at the end of the video, integrates with aweber, so you can add call to action like join our email list and get our free reports.

Trisha – popshops.com is a great tool, can even add a page on wordpress sites with related products from popshops

Pretty link Pro WordPress Plugin – make customized tiny urls so you don’t have to use bit.ly and have links on your own domain. Use for all affiliate links, as if affiliate program contacts you a year later and says we have changed our links or platform etc, way easier to update one redirect than digging through and having to update every single link and mention out there.

Here are some tips from the How to Relaunch/Revamp Your Affiliate Program session Deborah Carney from ABCs Plus, Amy Ely from Under Armour & Kim Salvino from Chateau 20 at Affiliate Summit East 2012 in New York #ase12

Deb – will you allow misspellings? And similar domains? Think about what you will and won’t allow

Kim says good idea to say ask for explicit written permission, that way they will reach out to you

Kim – share conversion rate, average order value, they will look at those stats and key figures and decide whether they want to promote you

Make good search engine keywords in your FAQs as that will help you get found by affiliates that search keywords like hotels, flights etc

Have good range of creative

Amy – banners and text, the key here is to have variety, as if you don’t have the creative type they are looking for affiliates will move on, make sure you have what you need on hand

Good way to start is ask what creative they need and if you can create a custom size for them

Inspire your affiliates to think about different ways to promote by having different creative for different occasions of the year etc

Deep links and datafeeds

Amy – deep links should be a requirement, deep links reduces the amount of clicks to conversion, getting customer one step closer to the cart, means they are most likely to convert which is better for both of you, sending customers to home page means they get distracted

Deb – Affiliates want to send people directly to the page that has the product, not the home page. Problem is you have a deep link and you pull that product? 500 affiliates now link to that page, at the very least send it to the category or a similar product, don’t just let that link fail as will make affiliates and you look bad.

Don’t delete, replace.

Speaking of deep links, if you are working with coupon affiliates, include the coupon code in the deep link

Amy – data feed critical, make sure well categorized, updated, don’t put affiliate in a position where somebody clicks and goes to a dead link.

Kim – make very good friends with your web dev team. At no time should affiliate traffic or your own traffic go to a dead page

Amy – have a selection of news and information about your company, anything important they can talk about to help sell your brand

Deb – If no-one is converting, that should be a clue to check out website and make sure the tracking pixel is tracking. As soon as development does any changes to the website at all, make sure to test your affiliate tracking. Affiliates will be livid and will drop you and even talk to other affiliates, have lost your trust and then no-one wants to run your program. If you run on many networks make sure to test for all

Review List of Current Partners

Check if they still have a website, go look at their websites, check your placement on their site, look at how they are promoting you

Make sure that they are complying with your T & C’s

If they are doing something wrong, like disallowed PPC – send them an email and they can remedy the situation. If they know they won’t get paid they will either stop or change

If you can see PPC has gone way up or way down ask other merchants and affiliate managers about their reputation. Deb says they talk to each other, affiliate managers let each other know if there are affiliates with bad practices so they are all aware.

Amy – just as affiliates do they same thing and talk about merchants and whether they are performing and whether there is anything that should be a concern

Communicating with tailored Email Newsletters

Kim – segment the list and don’t just send same blanket newsletter to all, make specific messages for top affiliates and also for the latent affiliates

Amy – invite them to email you if they want to contest that rejection, if affiliates reply and reach out and say actually you should approve me and here’s why, Amy has found some of those have turned out to be great affiliates

Give everything they need to get started in that welcome email – tracking link, creatives, where they go to get started

Send out introductory newsletter, introduce yourself, talk about updates made to T & C’s, give updates on Facebook, Twitter to get affiliates excited so they can see you have made updates and improvements and they should give another look

Deb – when you improve terms of your affiliate program you will attract new affiliates that now appreciate this. Affiliates see ok, somebody is paying attention now, so I have a better feeling about promoting this merchant

Amy – in welcome email, Talk about great things you have done to get the program to where it is. Amy said they talked about how they increased commission, made gift cards commissionable, made more creatives. Ask for feedback – when they give recommendations to make your program more attractive that is basically free consulting

Someone asked about finding an Affiliate Manager – Kim said check forums like the Affiliate Summit Forum. Amy says ask others who they are working with. Deb says on the Merchant ABCs site is a list or recommended sites they have worked with. Also try asking on some LinkedIn groups.

Someone asked about tools to minimize affiliate fraud. Deb said affiliates looking to commit fraud look for the low hanging fruit – that is on auto approve, doesn’t have an affiliate manager. Your own shopping cart solution should weed out the credit card fraud and scammer orders. You find it more when you have a lead based program as opposed to a commission program. As when you get a lead hard to test that right away, whereas to make a fraudulent purchase they have to commit credit card fraud

Here are my notes from the Optimizing WordPress for Speed and Conversions session at Affiliate Summit East 2012 in New York by David Vogelpohl from Marketing Clique, Nicholas Reese from Microbrand Media and Willie Jackson from W3 EDGE.

Optimizing WordPress for speed and conversions can have an immediate impact on your bottom line. Learn how to turn WordPress into a revenue driving machine.

David – definitely no more than 3 seconds, really want your site to load under 2 seconds

Waterfall view – how long it takes each individual element on your website to load

Dave here – check out my PLANKING VIDEO filmed by the Opera House and Sydney Harbour Bridge on my last night in Australia just before flying to New York City for my keynote at Affiliate Summit!

I want to say a big THANK YOU to Incentivize.com by CPAWay – they won my charity T-shirt auction and they’ll be donating $1500 to charity and I’ll wear their T-shirt during my keynote and Affiliate Summit. I really appreciate it, big thanks to Tom and his team for their generosity – and make sure you guys support them, visit their booth #210 & #212 at Affiliate Summit and check out Incentivize.com by CPAWay.com

The most exciting part – which charities this $1500 donation will go to will be decided by you. I would like to invite all of you guys and any of your friends, to submit your official fundraising pages for any government registered charity to DonateSponsor.org, and that $1500 will donated via the Top 10 Fundraising Pages that get the most votes in August

1st place gets a $300 donation
2nd – $250
3rd – $200
4th – $150
5th – $100
6th-10th – $100 each for all the rest of the Top 10

So spread the word to your friends and post your fundraising pages at DonateSponsor.org – and put some dares you are willing to do if people donate!

So big thanks again to Incentivize.com and CPAWay for making this all possible with their generous charity donation – and I’ll see you guys at my Affiliate Summit Keynote in the Hilton New York Grand Ballroom, Tues 14th August 330pm – be there or be square!

Chris Haddad from Money Fingers Inc did a great session at Clickbank Exchange 2012 on “Stupid” Copywriting Tricks to Triple Your Sales, here are some top tips for the presentation:

#1 Find out the primal desire of your market and give it to them

#2 Use Punch in the Gut storytelling – cause an immediate emotional impact

e.g. How Power Example – No.1 product on Clickbank

Instead of “I’m an electrician who will teach you to make power”

Changed to a family story where 3 year old daughter comes in, blue lips and says “Daddy I’m cold”

Very good – common enemy of big corporations – here is a secret I will teach you the simple method the big pharmaceutical companies don’t want you to know about

Make it about the human story not just the actual product, a personal story is even better

Classic story in make money niche – I was dead broke, my brother was off in NYC making half a million a year while I was making $24000 doing greeting cards then I discovered this one big secret …

More PIG stories and shock lines

Weight loss offer “Mummy, why are you so squishy”

Pick up offer “I felt humiliated and ashamed, never wanted to talk to a girl again”

How to make a ballsy promise:

Go for the best situation they can attain

Start – by writing the promise you would make if you could wave a magic wand and there were no rules and no limits

Much better to go there and drag it back to reality, rather than starting from the other side with a weak promise

Good promises are detailed and specific promises – you will slash your power bill by 70% and

Paint a specific picture in your prospects mind about what is going to happen for them and what their reality is going to be

#3 Use a magic mechanism to add an irresistible hook to your offer

“Mechanistic” benefits versus “Naked” benefits

Remember – your prospect has low self esteem about the topic you’re selling them. They don’t believe they can do it themselves and want to rely on a “magic button” to do it for them (I don’t want to learn to fish, I just want an endless supply of fish for free)

If they are looking for help on something, they really don’t believe they can do it themselves, have failed before

“If you can give voice to what I privately believe or fear in my heart but have never told anyone, I’ll trust you forever”

Reflect their experience back to them.

#5 Transform buying your $%^& into a noble and heroic act

Justification

People buy based on emotion and justify with logic

Transform buying your stuff into “The Right Thing to Do”

Buyer’s pride instead of buyers remorse

Financial product – say it will make you a hero to your family

Pick up niche – Nice guy who would treat a girl really nice gets to learn how to “rescue” the girls from the assholes out there. “picking up chicks” becomes “rescuing women”

Saving Money on power “protecting my little girls from those idiots in the government”

#6 Use Aftercare Q and A to remove objections and boost your sales

During your pitch sell as hard as you have to

Aftercare – post pitch shift in tone – “we’re just friends talking … I want to make sure you make the right choice”

Saw a 20% increase in conversions when we implemented this

If you have a really great product – aren’t you being a dick by not selling them as well as you can?

End with we are almost done here and you have 2 choices – Option 1, go back to what you were doing, go look at your bank account and be depressed, go back and be lonely, but we both know what you are doing isn’t working and if you go back things are going to be the same or get worse

Option 2 – you can take what you learned here today and try and do it yourself, but you know from the video it took me a long time to figure this out, and if you try it yourself the odds are pretty good you will mess this stuff up

Option 3 – You can risk absolutely nothing as we have a 60 day guarantee, click add to cart below, and let me do all the work for you …

What type of bonuses to include:

– Future problems bonus, something they don’t need yet but will need.

People are always looking for something new and a new idea they haven’t heard before e.g. with IM niche, now its Facebook, then twitter, then Pinterest etc

Preparation techniques, and understanding how to manage the flow of an interview

Mistakes:

– Pretending

– Low production value

– Lack of preparation

– Trite questions

– Lack of guest control

– Lack of vocal confidence

Better to not be perfect – the imperfection of your conversations lends the humanity and authenticity that makes people stop and listen

Top 10 Success Tips

Hooking the whales

Solid production value

“Speak to Sell” Affiliate Revenue

Asking killer questions nobody has thought of before

Finding their humanity – creates an opportunity to create rapport and a connection between them and you and your users. Separates you from someone who just does Q&A to someone who is truly a masterful interviewer

– Standardize your format: Interview style? Think of a person e.g. “Kate” and you and your guru are speaking to “kate” don’t speak to your customers

– Dialog, Q&A, skype, Google Hangout?

– Double-Ender Editing. On Skype – Both record. You record your side, they record their side, get them to send it to you and send to your editor who puts them together and it sounds like your are in the same room.

– Power Collection

– Super Secret Questions

– Easy Question Generators

– The Grid

– Guest Prep

– In-Interview Techniques

– Edit, Transcribe, Radiate

Standardize for your series of content so it is consistent

Typical 30 minute Interview Plan

If you have to do an hour, cut it into part 1 and part 2

Standardize openers “Welcome to XXX interview series, I am your host Susan Bratton, and in this episode we will talk to XXX”

Then get right into the meat

Come out with your best question first

Close the interview the same way each time, have your little sign off consistent

Hooking the whale

– Who are you?

– Who is your audience?

– What do you want?

– Process?

– Timeframes?

– What will they get?

– What will you do with it?

Audio most of the time – a lot easier to produce and consume.

I will give you the mp3, but if you send it out to your customer list, but don’t put the whole thing fully available online

You can also post the transcript or cut into many blog posts

Come to the whale with – what’s in it for them? What exactly to they have to do?

I would love to wear YOUR company T-shirt during my keynote and the entire conference including all video interviews in exchange for a direct donation to charity. I can even thank your company in my speech/slides and give blog posts and backlinks on FatCowBusiness.com and DonateSponsor.org.

Would love your help and support – if you know anyone that may be interested in this (maybe a client, friend or company you manage) can you please forward this message and hit share on Facebook and Twitter? (any website with an affiliate program would get a huge benefit!)

The charity auction ends 31st July so please let me know urgently. I am prepared to pull the auction early if I can find the right company, (e.g. if you could offer $5000 to charity I could confirm right away and start promoting). But ANY amount you could bid would be appreciated, would really appreciate offering $1000 or $1500 would work well to start us off!

You would be donating the full amount directly to charity.

I can put your logo and website on screen and even hyperlink it, my slides are put on slideshare which are again tweeted out by Affiliate Summit and everyone and always get thousands of views.

I can even bring a large plush Kangaroo and that can sit on stage wearing your T-shirt too!

Also remember unlike normal sessions, the entire keynote is filmed and put on Youtube by Affiliate Summit and sent out to everyone straight after and kept online forever.

You also get the FIRST and signed COPY of my book “The Four Year Old Entrepreneur: 7 Secrets to Making Money with Blogging, Facebook Marketing & Twitter for Business”.

I will thank your company at the start of my keynote and also at the end when I explain how the audience can vote for their favourite charities and fundraisers via the Non-Profit Charity Fundraising Social Network DonateSponsor.org (in honour of my cousin Jim). People such as my fellow Affiliate Summit teammates in the Damon Runyon Cancer Foundation Runyon5K and the Avon Walk for Breast Cancer can submit their official fundraising pages which we help promote – you would be the inaugural sponsor and official August sponsor and at the end of August you will donate the $5000 directly to charities via the Top 20 Fundraising Pages with the most votes.

This will engage the audience and entire community online like wildfire – because THEY are all a part of it, and they are all invited to submit their favourite charities and vote up fundraising pages so their friends and favourite charities can win donations.

There is huge potential for the site to go viral – it is starting with the Affiliate Summit community, every person who votes or submits shares to their friends on Facebook and people post dares they will do for charity to get even more attention, like this idiot from Australia daring to plank during the Affiliate Summit Keynote for Cancer Research

With all the interviews and build up to the conference online it would create such a MASSIVE viral buzz on Social Media from now until the keynote and beyond. This is a tremendous opportunity to leverage the leading affiliates, publishers and bloggers in the world.

The $5000 will need to be donated in the first week of September. At the end of August I will send you a list of the Top 20 Fundraising Pages on DonateSponsor.org with the most votes (most likely from the Damon Runyon Cancer Foundation and Avon Walk for Breast Cancer) and you will make the donations directly via their fundraising pages.

You will be donating the ENTIRE AMOUNT DIRECTLY to government registered charities – neither myself, nor Affiliate Summit, nor any other company receives one red cent.

Would REALLY appreciate your support and I also want to make this a win/win situation. I LOVE supporting good people who help others and will do everything I can do ensure you receive the value back many times over.

So, what is the maximum you can donate to charity to be the Affiliate Summit Closing Keynote Sponsor and DonateSponsor.org August Sponsor?

P.S. I also need some prizes to give away to the audience during my keynote (last year I gave away a boomerang, didgeridoo and kangaroo) so if you can donate a prize please email me Dave ‘at’ FatCowBusiness.com. In particular I am seeking:

– A travel voucher for flights / hotels so I can give away a trip to Australia! Such as a $2000 flight voucher (I will promote this heaps for you and it will build such a massive buzz)

– An Apple iPad 3 or $499 via PayPal so I can buy it myself at the Apple Store New York – I am showing an amazing viral publicity example of iClothing by a fashion designer as a case study in my speech and would love to give away an iTee/iDress and be able to have a real iPad in there as a prize to someone in the audience! Will thank and plug your company for providing the prize

I am heading over to New York City soon and will be going to the Clickbank Exchange on August 10-11, 2012 at the Marriott Marquis in Times Square, New York City.

Would be great if any of you guys can join me, it is the 2 days (Friday and Saturday) before Affiliate Summit where I am speaking and delivering the closing keynote – hit me up @fatcowbusiness on Twitter if you will be around in New York City!

Clickbank Exchange was great last year – these people here are real entrepreneurs selling millions of dollars of info products like ebooks and videos online and many have started from scratch into building 7 and 8 figure businesses.

They have a special rate of US$269 + tax per night at the Marriott Marquis which I would recommend you guys take advantage of as it is usually like $500 a night. Get the Discount Hotel Rate here.

Dr. Cialdini is the one of the top living social psychologist in the world today and his books on influence and persuasion have sold over 2 million copies. I loved studying Consumer Behaviour at Uni and learning about psychological triggers and what influences people is always fancinating and I am looking forward to getting some great nuggets from this session.

All of these 3 guys are guns in Internet Marketing so can’t wait for this session. I have many friends in the fitness niche and Ryan Lee is one of the top experts there, and now runs some really successful coaching programs with really low refund rates. Looking forward to learning from Ryan and he is one guy who has managed to turn over the big bucks while still keeping it ethical and giving value and having happy customers. He also has lots of great stuff on his blog RyanLee.com which has over 200,000 subscribers.

I’m also looking forward to hearing from Chris Farrell – he has also has many successful training products for beginners including one launch that made over $1 million in sales in 24 hours.

2:30pm – Masterful Interviews, Profitable Content
Susan Bratton

I saw Susan speak at our Affil@Syd conference in Australia and she was great. I actually took notes and made a video after Susan’s session with Email Marketing Tips for Affiliates. I agree interviews are a great way to get content and leverage off other peoples followers, so looking forward to getting lots of great tips from Susan in her session.

Chris is one of the top copyrighters behind several multi-million dollar launches and Clickbank #1 products so looking forward to grabbing some tips from him to increase conversions and sales.

5:00pm – Is Selling Evil?
Joe Polish

I saw Joe speak at the ClickBank Exchange 2011 and he was great! Joe consults for $25,000 per half day and has an impressive list of A-list friends and clients including Bill Phillips, Michael Gerber, Eben Pagan, David Bach, Dan Sullivan, Brian Tracy, Dean Graziosi, Robert Kiyosaki and more. I remember Paula Abdul did a video testimonial for him last time, and he also was telling us the power of making a introduction video for ourselves with testimonials from others, I still remember the video Joe then showed us which was awesome.

There is also a Speed Networking session at 6:30pm on Friday

Saturday, August 11

9:00am – The Charge: Activating the 10 Human Drives That Make You Feel Alive
Brendon Burchard

I always find the psychological triggers than drive human behaviour fascinating, and Brendon is one of the top experts in this area and the #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Millionaire Messenger.

10:30am – How to Build a Blog That Attracts an Endless Supply of Leads and Sales
Derek Halpern

Derek has some great tips on his podcasts and Social Triggers blog, especially about building leads, traffic and sales so looking forward to getting some more great tips from his session. Derek is also speaking over at Affiliate Summit in the following days as well.

1:00pm – How to Profit Wildly From AutoWebinars
Mark Ling

Mark has been one of Clickbank’s highest selling product owners and affiliates with millions of dollars in sales. I have recently been checking out his latest products Affilorama and Affiloblueprint which have tonnes of videos and content and all the sales copy and the way that has been set up for affiliates to promote is brilliant.

3:30pm – Traffic: Forget Everything Else
Mike Hill

Mike is the creator of the hugely popular CPA Tsunami product and an expert in increasing traffic and conversions so looking forward to getting some great tips from his session.

Then Clickbank Exchange ends with a great cocktail party at 630pm on Saturday … will see you guys in New York

Hope to see you guys there, but as always just like last time I’ll be there and taking lots of notes and making videos for you guys which I would love to send to you guys so make sure you sign up free at to our FatCowBusiness VIP Club.

At number 50 on the Internet Retailer Top 500 and climbing fast, Wayfair is one of the hottest etail stories of 2012. Over $600m in revenues per annum, and highly profitable, Wayfair is missile-lock focused on hyper-growth – and winning. In this exclusive Online Retailer keynote, learn how this homewares retailer leveraged organic search and resolved the complexity of consolidating 100 domains into three brands, built an indomitable platform for success, and drove the quest for hyper-growth in the US. Now, it’s Australia’s turn.

5.05 – 6.00 – Networking Reception – Should be good, hopefully some free drinks! If anyone is keen to go out in Sydney the best place on Tuesday night is Salsa @ Establishment on George St which has a packed house until 2am.

In a market that is growing daily in sophistication, traditional web analytics tools and techniques are increasingly unable to deliver actionable and valuable insights from monitoring web traffic alone. A new era of digital analytics has sprung to life in its place, filling the gaps between online customer experience and real-world ramifications. In this talk, we’ll look at some of the latest techniques used by websites today, as well as innovative tools every online business needs to survive in a new digital world.

The balance of power has shifted from Enterprise to the Customer. Frank and candid conversations about your brand, products, services and customers’ experiences are occurring throughout the digital world. A new wave of digital natives are presenting themselves as both opportunity and challenge for the present and future success of your business. Are you able to participate in these digital conversations, anticipate and fulfil these customers’ needs on their terms, while profitably growing your business?

Site abandonment is a big concern for many retailers and many times those visitors are lost when they are unable to find the products they are looking for. Optimising site search and navigation is key in retaining your visitors and turning them into buyers. Join Shaun Ryan, CEO of SLI Systems, and he discusses how to optimise your site search and navigation as well as how to look at your visitors’ behaviour to deliver a more personalised user experience across all online channels.

Gain a new understanding of your website funnels! Stop relying solely on exit, bounce and conversion rates. When serving the “connected consumer” tracking numbers is simply not enough. If you want to make sure your funnels meet all the expectations of your prospects and are delivering maximum performance, you have to track customer experience and behaviour inside your funnel. Eliminate the guess work from your optimization efforts by collecting and analysing customer feedback shared in your funnels – the most crucial customer touch points for any retail website.

Site optimisation is not a one-time activity, nor a one-off tactic. Site optimisation is the superset of activities including testing, segmentation, targeting, personalisation and recommendation of content. Executing any of these activities improves your online performance. Mark Allison will teach you how to optimise your website by letting your visitors decide what works best for them. See Webtrends customer examples from Australia and around the world and learn the true value of optimisation and the tangible business benefits associated with testing

We have all read the news, we all know the facts on how fast the ecommerce industry is growing, and we all know how much Australians’ spend online is growing every year. Let’s dig deeper around what are the successful digital strategies being deployed in the online marketing industry to power this phenomenal revolution. We will show you the inside story on which clients are making it look easy. We will show you the levers that can be pulled to influence the flow of the customer journey. These levers can increase conversion and lifetime value, and decrease wastage of your marketing dollars. We will show you practical ways that you can use these proven ideas in your business, to help garner incremental customers cost effectively.

Using principles of good ecommerce design, and lots of current examples, Daniela will show you how to apply leading usability practices for online shops, including navigation design elements, category & product pages that work, product imagery that sells, effective use of social media features and shopping cart elements to help your customer complete their purchase

Google has publicly said that they are cracking down on “web spam” also known as “over-optimization” and the latest Google Penguin update means factors like exact match anchor text are being used not as much and Google is looking more at the quality, diversity and natural look of the sites linking in and in fact penalizing sites where the percentage of keyword anchor text links or irrelevant sites looks too high or unnatural which Google deems as spam. Using automatic algorithms to detect and penalize web spam is not perfect and means innocent websites have also been caught up and penalized especially as Google irons out the problems.

Here are some of the main changes and what you can do to recover or avoid being penalized. These are actually changes that have been becoming more important for a while now but have become more pronounced with the Google Penguin Algorithm Update to combat web spam which took affect on April 24th 2012:

1) Avoid a high percentage of links from non-relevant sites – focus on links from relevant sites

Sites that appeared to be hit hardest in the penguin update had a higher percentage of links from non-relevant sites, which does look spammy and unnatural.

This has always been something to consider but Google seems to be taking it more seriously with the Penguin update.

I saw this first hand a while ago as I had a domain from an old site that I wasn’t using any more and 301 redirected it to another site which was in a different niche. There were lots of links and the new site seemed to get many of the links transferred and was ranking well for its new keywords for the first 1-2 months then tanked. I am pretty certain that the links from irrelevant sites from the old domain were the problem, so if you were going to 301 redirect an old domain to minimize the risk of any penalty try and keep it in the same niche.

Matt Cutts actually talked about this and gave an example of what they are going after – he showed an article about tips for nutrition which just had random words like “payday loan” and “fash cash loans” inserted and hyperlinked which had no relevance to the article at all and would make no sense to a human reader. So the point is you want to focus on getting a fair amount of links from sites that are actually relevant and at least broadly in the same niche.

One concern I have is say you do a Guest Post for a Business website and the author box or even the newspaper/magazine article featuring you links to your other websites which are in different non-business niches. For links from high quality sites that should not be a problem as the penalties seem to be more for low quality links and if those irrelevant links make up the lion’s share of your links overall.

Sites with an unnaturally high percentage of the same keyword exact match anchor text links appeared to be hit hardest in the penguin update.

To avoid this make sure there are a fair amount of links pointing to your site that use different and natural anchor text like your URL and your site name.

Good quality sites with diverse link profiles don’t seem to be getting penalised if there are spammy links here and there – the penalty is if that is all you do.

3) High quality links are becoming more and more important – Focus on quality than quantity

People have been saying this for a long time but it is becoming more and more important especially with the latest Google Penguin Update.

With blackhat techniques like article spinning and forum spamming the payoffs seem to be becoming less and less and the risks of being penalized becoming greater and greater.

Focus on the high quality links which you can get via Guest Blog posting and also getting PR from media and online magazines and newspapers like HARO and TheSourceBottle.

A good foundation of high quality links should safeguard against getting penalized for spammy links and negative seo tactics by competitors.

I remember Wil Reynolds (who is very anti-blackhat) said in his Affiliate Summit keynote that if you have a very whitehat / established site then “you could probably get away with some of these things … I can’t believe I just said that”). Rand Fishkin from SEOmoz also believes that if you have a whitehat / established site then you should not worry about being penalized, and he is so confident that with the current talk of negative seo he has issued a public challenge for spammers to try and get his sites penalized.

There is obviously quite a bit of concern at the moment about negative SEO and people hurting competitors by deliberately buying lots of unnatural spammy anchor text links to point to competitors websites in order to get their sites penalized. There have been some examples on forums where people have gotten sites penalized by deliberately buying spammy links and pointing them to competitors.

Best way to protect yourself from this is link diversity and having high quality links as spammy links alone don’t seem to get your site penalized – but having only spammy links does.

4) Careful of a high bounce rate

Google has talked about since the beginning of time to “focus on the user experience”. I usually prefer actionable tips rather than rhetoric but there is a very quick way to look at this – bounce rate, which you can see in your Google Analytics. Google is realizing it cannot rely just on links and exact match anchor text so if those factors are being discounted, the other signals and information they have such as bounce rate will be used more and more.

This is something I don’t see people talk about as much but I have found it to be one of the most important factors in SEO, especially since the Google Panda Updates and now the Google Penguin Update. Basically any page that has a very high bounce rate will not stay ranking in Google for long. If somebody clicks on your result in Google, and within seconds they have closed your page, hit the back button and are back at Google clicking on other results – well that sends Google a pretty strong signal that your website is not what somebody searching for that keyword is looking for, and if this keeps happening Google won’t keep sending traffic there. When you hit back after viewing a search result Google now even displays the option to “block results from this domain” that you just visited. I always knew this would apply to pages and that particular search term, but with the Google Panda and Penguin updates having lots of low quality links and high bounce rates can penalize your whole site and domain.

To ensure a low bounce rate make sure there is a good user experience and the page offers exactly what the user is searching for and avoid stuffing the page with irrelevant keywords to the sake of getting SEO traffic – although tempting it will harm you in the long term.

I remember a while ago I was writing some reviews for online marketing products and saw people were searching for keywords like “product X filestube” and “product X rapidshare” and “product X torrent” so I tried to mention those keywords in my reviews (not in a deceptive way), but by saying – “make sure you download this from the official site rather than downloading from filestube, rapidshare or torrents so you get all the updates and support”.

Sure enough we got traffic from those keywords at first – but none of that traffic converted. I firmly believe a user is signalling their intentions by what the keywords they are typing – people looking for rapidshare, filestube, torrent, piratebay etc obviously have no intention to purchase or hand over any money. More importantly, if you are trying to sell them the product and obviously not offering a free rapidshare / torrent download which they are looking for they will just hit the back button and go back to Google and your bounce rate will go through the roof. So not only do you not get any benefit but more importantly by having a high bounce rate you risk penalizing your other pages on your domain as Google is focusing more and more on trusted domains.

Bottom line, deliver what you promise and don’t BS. When you consider that building a list and repeat customers is where the money is then tricking people to come into your site for a one-off is not the foundation of a long term lucrative business. With Social Media and social signals this whole sphere of customer feedback and interactions are becoming more and more transparent for all to see – Manipulation is not an ongoing tool for success.

For a quick tip using a WordPress SEO Plugin like SEOpressor and de-indexing your wordpress tags pages and wordpress categories pages means that people will actually land and click through on posts which usually tend to be higher quality and have a lower bounce rate.

Also I have been using this free plugin WP Post Corrector to bulk update posts and it is great! Managed to update tags on 100s of posts and bulk update easily

5) Focus on building a real business not an SEO play

Google looks for signals of a quality site and a real business with return readers and things like a Facebook, Twitter and Google Plus following and reader engagement and comments are becoming more important

More importantly, if you want to build a long term business asset all of these Google updates should serve as an important lesson – don’t rely on getting traffic from Google or even any paid source like PPC, Google Ads, Facebook Ads forever. That is not a business – it’s an arbitrage opportunity at best that could be shut off at any moment.

Any good business over time should be based more and more on repeat customers. Look at what is happening to the travel sites now like Expedia. They would have received a mammoth amount of search traffic from Google in the beginning for so many terms but if they did not build a list and brand and market to repeat customers and just relied on this flow of free traffic from Google being constant forever then they would be stuffed when Google made changes that effectively switched off the tap to them. Much of the traffic that Google used to send to sites like Expedia is now going to Google’s own properties like its own flight comparison engine and therefore bypassing comparison engines, and this is happening in many verticals like shopping and not just travel.

Have your sites been hit by the Google Penguin update? What changes have you seen and what steps do you recommend? Also what do you guys think of these increased penalties and the potential for negative SEO and sites being able to harm deliberately harm competitors by pointing spammy links? Would love to hear your comments!

List Eruption is a very exciting new WordPress Plugin which will help you to increase your email subscribers. It’s a well known fact that the key to making money online, getting more traffic and making more sales is to grow your email list. List Eruption allows you to explode your list by incentivizing visitors to refer their friends and thereby increase your subscribers by over 257%.

What is List Eruption?

The List Eruption Plugin is a powerful WordPress Plugin which can double and triple your subscribers instantly. Tim Atkinson and Mark Thompson are the founders of this WP Plugin which has produced amazing results and increased subscribers by over 257%.

How List Eruption works

The List Eruption Plugin works on the concept of power of ‘WE’. When a user downloads a product or signup for the newsletter they will be directed to a page where they can see the bonus incentives. They will get rewarded for the referrals they make.

List Eruption acts as a referral management system. You are able to reward each of your subscribers for helping you to grow the list. As subscribers refer 1 friend, 5 friends, 10 friends the program will automatically deliver the reward content once the subscribers achieve each of the reward levels that you set.

How List Eruption Plugin differs from other programs?

List Eruption plugin gives you full control over the system where you can set the reward levels. Secondly List Eruption plugin comes with the facility of easy social sharing options with Twitter and Facebook. It works with all major email providers including AWeber, mailchimp, icontact, constant contact, Getresponse and more.

It is easy to use and you don’t need any programming skills to start with List Eruption. Just plug List Eruption into your blog and you’re ready to go.

List Eruption also does not use Facebook Connect so does not require users to give over access to their account, they merely get a special url to share on their wall or email/tweet out. This is great as some users are hesitant to allow automatic programs to access their account and post on their behalf.

How much does List Eruption cost?

There are two plans with List Eruption plugin- Single License and Unlimited License. Single License costs a one time fee of $47 where as unlimited license costs just $97. List Eruption plugin has a 60 day money back guarantee too. More over if you purchase today, they are including a special List Eruption bonus package worth $997

If you are serious about growing your list, List Eruption is the best plugin available.

After stuffing around with many WordPress squeeze page plugins and trying to edit templates and sidebars and get landing pages, I discovered using OptimizePress is by far the quickest, easiest and simplest way to create landing pages in WordPress. Even if you are using another theme, simply install a new copy of wordpress in a subfolder and use OptimizePress as a Theme for that site and you can easily setup all the squeeze pages you want in a few clicks.

OptimizePress Example

Our squeeze pages here on FatCowBusiness are powered using OptimizePress, basically I just took one of their free templates and put in my text, cut and paste my Aweber autoresponder and code and put in one picture and it was live and collecting emails in minutes. See live OptimizePress example at FatCowBusiness.com/join:

We use OptimizePress to power our squeeze pages here at FatCowBusiness.com

OptimizePress WordPress Theme Review

The OptimizePress WordPress Theme is the simplest and easiest way to create amazing squeeze pages. The hardest part has been done for you; all you have to do is decide the options you want (of course, the content as well).

James Dyson is the man behind OptimizePress. He has been doing graphics for people in the internet marketing field for a little over 5 years. He has also worked with several big names in the field who are easily earning more than 7 figures. He is a person who pays attention to detail and all his pages and graphics are conversion tested. He has now formed a new package packed with all these advantages in an easy and effortless system.

Why OptimizePress Is A Must have

OptimizePress provides an opportunity to make pages that look that they were made by a pro. You have the option to create new, edit pages or add pages. A drop down menu provides the preinstalled shortcodes which are automatically added to your HTML.

The benefits of this software are that you will be able to easily make awesome launch squeeze pages with amazing videos. They will also be able to easily build an email list with the inbuilt squeeze page designs that are just right for your needs, enabling you to generate excellent selling pages that are amazingly effective. The software is so flexible that it will be able to work with any kind of shopping cart, associate program and it would even be able to support any auto responder. There are many times that you hear things like “no expertise required” and you might think that it is not true, but this time it is. If you try to establish some of these pages, it might take months together but with this software it will јust take you 5 minutes to create a squeeze page that as well with very little effort on your part.

The simplicity of this theme makes it a must have; it’s a total package for you to be inspired and create. The sky is the limit when adding features to your page. Depending upon which page you want to make, you can add graphics, buy now buttons, bullets, videos, sidebar, header, and so much more.

OptimizePress Features

Features can be added to squeeze pages to sales funnels and offer pages. The codes are already built right into the theme, no matter what type of page you need. What could be simpler? Perhaps built-in SEO features, cross browser compatibility or step by step launch builder system.

The total package includes:
– The OptimizePress Theme
– Eye Catching Graphics Pack
– A Complete Page Building Solution
– A Shortcode Sales Letter Building System
– PDF User Guide
– Support That Is First Class

Not worrying about having to have design talent or coding skills makes this theme even more appealing. Having everything you need already built-in is great and makes the whole process less stressful.

There are multiple templates, graphics, colors and even different fonts for each type of page you can create. You can create 10 of the same page and each one can look completely different.

Truly One Click

This theme was designed with you in mind. Your time is important and so is the work you do. You get to choose the option you want with one click. You can click one box or all of the selection boxes. Change a design and then change it back again. Speaking of “one click”, each option is јust a click to accept. It can’t get easier than that; a great timesaver and money saver.

Every aspect of creating your unique page is already preset within this theme. You simply get to put it all together. This WordPress theme works great to easily create high quality pages to promote your service or product.

G’day Mates, it’s Dave here, check out this video I made while chilling with my pet kangaroos here in Australia!

All these kangaroos have been jumping around as they are so excited – and I’m really excited too to be the first ever Australian to be Keynote Speaker of Affiliate Summit, the largest Affiliate Marketing Conference in the world, at the Hilton Grand Ballroom in New York City this August 14 at 4pm.

It’s a huge honour and I wanted to say thank you so much to all my friends at Affiliate Summit for all your support

Excitement reaches fever pitch down under and kangaroos go berserk as Dave Cupples is announced as the first ever Australian to be Keynote Speaker of Affiliate Summit in New York City

These kangaroos are so excited they even attempt to bite me in the nuts at 0.16 and a Kangaroo knocks over my camera and eats my script at 2.00!

I’ll be speaking about “7 Secrets to using Social Media and Affiliate Marketing to live your dreams”.

Last time I gave away a boomerang, didgeridoo and kangaroo – and will be giving away some awesome prizes again.

I’m also running the Damon Runyon Cancer Foundation Runyon 5K at Yankee Stadium on Sunday August 12 – I ran this before and it was just inspiring, and we even have an Affiliate Summit team which I highly recommend you guys join. That same week there is also the Clickbank Exchange in New York City as well.

So for any of you guys who are entrepreneurs, authors or do any internet marketing – I totally recommend you join me in New York! These people at Affiliate Summit are amazing and I’ve been flying all the way from Australia every time for the last few years. Especially lots of my Young Entrepreneur friends from Australia and around the world – it is totally worth the trip to New York! I will be there for most of August and we can do the Clickbank Exchange, Runyon5K and Affiliate Summit, would be great to see you all there

Tickets are cheaper the earlier you get them so check out AffiliateSummit.com and don’t let this opportunity hop away like these kangaroos! I’ve made lots of videos with tips from sessions and experts from the last few conferences and have plenty more coming up which I’ll share with you guys free at FatCowBusiness.com

So I can’t wait to see you all in New York City!

P.S. The special discounted rate on Affiliate Summit East passes is until May 11th 2012 so recommend you book your tickets now – I would personally recommend the Platinum / VIP pass which includes access to all the sessions and keynotes.

P.P.S. Missy and Shawn were running a foursquare promotion and giving away FREE networking passes to Affiliate Summit and these would include access to my keynote! This was also only valid until 11th May so you would need to hurry and you can enter by taking and uploading a photo and checking in on foursquare!

]]>http://apeagency.com/video-kangaroos-attack-affiliate-summit-keynote-speaker-and-eat-script-ase12/feed/0Top Sessions to Vote for at Affiliate Summit East 2012 in New York City #ASE12http://apeagency.com/top-sessions-to-vote-for-at-affiliate-summit-east-2012-in-new-york-city-ase12/
http://apeagency.com/top-sessions-to-vote-for-at-affiliate-summit-east-2012-in-new-york-city-ase12/#commentsSun, 29 Apr 2012 11:05:04 +0000http://apeagency.com/?p=5555

Hey guys,

Voting for Sessions at Affiliate Summit East 2012 in New York City is open now until 5th May 2012 so suggest you guys have a browse and vote here.

Here are some top picks of sessions I thought looked excellent or the people were particularly smart and helpful:

David is one of the most knowledgeable guys I know and also genuinely helpful to others and does not hold back. This should be an awesome topic too as David is a gun in this area and actually knows how to do this stuff hands on, plus at many conferences people mention google analytics but don’t go into the important details of how to actually do it. Should be an awesome session! Watch David in action as a special guest on FatCowBusiness TV on “Email vs Social Media & Facebook” and “Group Buying Daily Deal Sites & Australian Local Business Marketing”

Deb and Jim really know their stuff when it comes to book publishing and have both created tonnes of awesome books and have been very supportive and helpful to myself and many other aspiring authors in Affiliate Summit in getting our first books up too. These guys are here to help and don’t hold back, should be an awesome session! (check out this podcast I did with Deb, Vinny and fellow Aussie David Iwanow on Facebook vs Email Marketing)

Justin is a very smart and helpful guy and did some awesome roundtables / sessions at the last few Affiliate Summits. This should be a great topic too as so many people mention the importance of measuring, split testing, goal tracking, Google webmaster tools etc but rarely get into the details of how to actually do it properly, should be a great session!
See my notes from Justin’s previous session on “Community, Conversation, Conversion – Social Tips You Need” as well as some awesome tips in this video filmed live from the last Affiliate Summit in Las Vegas “Facebook Fan Gating, Edgerank & Sponsored Stories Tips”

These sisters are experts in the industry and Deb especially has been very helpful and knows her stuff. Would be a very useful session for many people I know! (check out this podcast I did with Deb, Vinny and David Iwanow about Facebook vs Search Marketing).

Steph knows her stuff about Social Media and did a great presentation in New York last year (see my notes from the session on “Social Media Marketing – 5 Tips to get Followers, Traffic and Sales”). I may add Steph was really nice and helpful and went out of her way to show me around at my first Affiliate Summit in New York even though she wasn’t my official mentor. Viral strategies for Social Media is a hot topic right now so shd be a great session! Good luck guys!

Very smart peeps on this panel should be a good one! Daniel is pretty much the top guy around in podcasting, Todd was part of our Books4Boobies author drive and wrote some great books on Affiliate Marketing and Trisha runs the top coupon feed service which I have been scoping out a lot lately

Have watched of Murray’s videos lately which have been awesome so keen to get some tips! I saw John making some cool video’s too at the last Affiliate Summit in Vegas (I believe I was dancing at the Shareasale party in some) so this session should be a good one! Look forward to maybe making a few video blogs with you guys in New York!

I saw Zac speak when he came out to Sydney for our Affili@Syd Australia conference and his story about making $860,000 profit in 4 months from his MySpace site was awesome and blew everyone away, when I spoke at Affili@Syd I mentioned how John Chow’s blog makes $40,000 a month and peoples jaws dropped to the floor … these guys all know their stuff about blogging so should be a great session!

These guys know their stuff, I have also seen Chris’ sessions at the last few Affiliate Summits and they were awesome (see my notes on Chris’ session at Affiliate Summit West on Increasing Website Conversions here).

Derek has some awesome insights on his blog so this should be a great session. When studying marketing at uni I loved studying consumer behaviour and psychological principles are always very interesting to learn!

Must admit I am more a night owl than an early bird but Eric know his stuff and is also a very nice and helpful guy! Btw Eric thanks again for those notes for the sessions that doubled up that I couldn’t get to during #ASW12!

As its name implies, Flexsqueeze 1.5 also known as the Flexibility 3 Theme is incredibly dynamic and contains a massive amount of plug-ins, configurations, tutorials, graphics and almost anything else you might want in a deluxe WordPress theme.

This theme allows you to modify almost any aspect of your site through its sleek interface. Literally every element of your sites layout can be modified. This includes fonts, backgrounds, navigation styles and color schemes. Take advantage of the current Flexsqueeze discount code to add even more flavor to your site.

Since I feel like I often spend a lot of time stripping a WordPress theme of things I don’t need for my site, I really liked some of the preset styles that come with this theme. I especially enjoy the pre-loaded navigation styles and the “quick change” settings. The fact that you tell Flexsqueeze if you want to make a blog or a website means you’ll spend a lot less time trying to make WordPress look like a website when it is meant for blogging.

The fact that this is a one-time purchase that you can use on many sites makes this theme a real steal. You can see in their gallery of sites how drastically different sites were created using only this tool. I really feel like this theme deals with some of the most common annoyances of working with WordPress.

Upgrading to a full membership or using the Flexsqueeze discount code unlocks even more skins and graphics. The niche header creator even takes this one step further; Imagine a wizard-like interface that lets you design brilliant, eye-catching headers by combining different fonts and stock graphics. Any serious web developer will want to have this tool in his or her arsenal.

]]>http://apeagency.com/flexsqueeze-review/feed/0VIDEO: How Social Media is influencing Search Results, Mobile and Local Business Marketinghttp://apeagency.com/video-how-social-media-is-influencing-search-results-mobile-and-local-business-marketing/
http://apeagency.com/video-how-social-media-is-influencing-search-results-mobile-and-local-business-marketing/#respondWed, 18 Apr 2012 12:59:43 +0000http://apeagency.com/?p=5524

Check out this video I filmed from beautiful Lake Travis at Austin, Texas recapping a great session at Affiliate Summit West 2012 by Dave Taylor on Social Media & Affiliate Marketing (my notes from Dave’s #ASW12 session are here) and some thoughts on the future of Social Media impacting Search Engines, Local Deals and Affiliate Marketing.

How Social Media is influencing search results and new developments with Google Search Plus Your World

Check out my Gary Vaynerchuk Accent & Impersonation at 0.40-0.60 – Gary has some awesome insights and I saw Gary on the news the other day talking about how Google “dropped a bomb” and changed search results so you will see results based on what you have liked on Google+ or what your friends have retweeted.

Why Facebook Ads and Sponsored Stories are so powerful:

Successful marketers nuture a trust relationship, then people will listen when you go to sell something

62% of people trust family, friends and contacts for recommendations of brands or products

“We have the cheapest prices” is not as good as “7 of your friends buy our products”

Facebook will show you an ad, then it will show you your friends that have liked that page/group or support that company of have brought that product

When you see “3 of your friends like this” you catch on and pay attention, that is tapping into the social media side of commerce and transactions

Facebook Sponsored Stories takes this to another level, allowing businesses to leverage the power of connections to create ads which are effectively testimonials

Group Buying and Daily Deals Coupon sites for Local Business Marketing

Merchants with Groupon & LivingSocial have to figure out how to turn this one time transaction into a relationship with a customer. Should say the Groupon deal gets you in the door, but to do the deal need to sign up for the loyalty program then get discount on next meal

Location Based Mobile Marketing such as Facebook Deals when checking in to Facebook Places

Proximity and geolocation are huge trends, as you are on your mobile it will say here is a deal for this local business nearby – I saw many times at Caesar’s Palace Las Vegas.

Key Points:

With Social Media, it’s not about SEO any more, it’s about relationships

Successful businesses are all about the relationships you have, and your ability to create and nuture their relationships

Hey guys watch my VIDEO LIVE from Washington, DC on tips for bloggers to conduct a covert operation and spy on competitors best backlinks and most shared and linked to pages!

Open Site Explorer is a great free tool to find your competitors most linked to pages. See this example of IncomeDiary.com, which is Michael’s blog, really smart guy. We can click and see the “Top Pages” that are getting the most links. Top Earning Blogs, Top 50 Influential Bloggers, Top Earning Websites – maybe it’s just me but I’m seeing a pattern here – these blog posts with top lists are attracting links. Michael actually had a blog post about this, saying if you want people to link to you, stroke their ego!

Site Example: IncomeDiary.com

Open Site Explorer also has a fantastic tool to spy on your competitors and find their most influential backlinks. Instead of blindly getting links from anywhere, look at what sites rank for your keywords in Google, look at where they are getting their links from and try and get those same links.
I searched for “Make Money Blogging” and the No.1 result was ProBlogger.net, which is by Darren Rowse, one of the most famous bloggers in the world. So I plug Darren’s blog into Open Site Explorer, and it shows the backlinks in order of the Page Authority and Domain Authority, plus shows the anchor text. And his most powerful backlink is from StudioPress which makes the Genesis WordPress Theme, and Darren scored this link by giving a testimonial – which is a another great idea to get backlinks.

Site Example – ProBlogger.net

Open Site Explorer by SEOMoz is a multi featured tool that allows anyone working on an SEO campaign to analyze the backlink profile of almost any website. With data on 65 billion URLs and over 9.2 billion links, Open Site Explorer allows the user to gather data on most websites that are ranking in Google, even if they do not yet rank on page one.

Open Site Explorer uses a unique algorithm that gathers statistics on websites and analyses them in a way that is very similar to Google’s search algorithm. This allows the user to get a sneak peak into what Google spiders are thinking when they inspect a website. The tool takes into account the total number of backlinks that a website has and how many unique websites link to that site (also known as linking root domains).

Open Site Explorer also estimates a page and domain authority, which compares the relative strength of the website compared to other websites in the same niche or industry. This allows the user to determine to what degree Google finds the website to be a reliable source of information.

Recently, Open Site Explorer added a feature that allows users to analyze up to five sites at once, making it easy to compare all the most important statistics at a glance. This feature is incredibly helpful to SEO professionals who are working on moving websites from a solid page one ranking up to the top three positions or rank one. While many of these excellent features are available in the free version of Open Site Explorer, the Pro version of the software is a must have for serious SEO professionals looking to achieve high rankings quickly.

Open Site Explorer reserves the most empowering features for those who really want to succeed in SEO. The Pro version of the tool allows users to access all the backlink data on websites, run unlimited reports, and access social media statistics. Ever since Google began incorporating Facebook feeds and Google Plus activity into search results, tracking social media has been a top priority for successful SEOs. Open Site Explorer allows users to stay on top of these trends. Moz understands that most people like to “try before they buy” so luckily, they offer a Open Site Explorer Free Trial.

Working WP Robot Discount Codes
[coupon code=”wprobot1″ /][coupon code=”wprobot2″ /]
(Choose the PayPal/Credit Card checkout option rather than Clickbank to ensure you are able to use the coupon codes)

WP Robot Review
WP Robot, the hugely successful and powerful autoblogging plugin for WordPress has just been updated to version 3. To be honest, it isn’t really an update, but more of a major rewrite of the code to offer a wider range of features and almost unlimited possibilities.

Even though the features have been greatly enhanced, the plugin is still very easy to use due to its logical structure and instant help boxes within the administration menu.

No matter which way you use WP Robot, one of the biggest benefits of WP Robot is that the content produced doesn’t look like automated content, especially with the randomizing process making the content look natural to both visitors and search engines alike. And there are plenty of different options for your randomization.

With WP Robot you will be able to create targeted blog posts on any topic or niche you like without having to write anything – this allows you to switch your blog onto complete auto-pilot and drip-feed it with fresh content at regular intervals that you can specify. And the best part – all the posts created will be targeted to the very keywords you specified!

At the moment WP Robot offers the following modules to your blog automatically and of course you have full control over which kind of posts will be created!

Amazon Module

The WP Robot Amazon Module uses the official Product Advertising API to request product information from Amazon and can create blog posts for any product sold on Amazon. It can also add all the reviews found on the product page and post them as comments! You will need a free API account to use this module.

Article Module

The Article Module can automatically post targeted articles for any keyword you specify to your blog, sourced from the large articlesbase.com article directory which contains thousands of articles! The template system also allows you to modify the look of your posts however you want.

eBay Module

The eBay Module can add the most recent and most popular auctions from eBay for your specified keyword(s) to your blog on complete autopilot. This module can also be added on to all of your posts if you want!

Clickbank Module

The Clickbank Module can drip-feed ads from clickbank.com to your blog posts.

Yahoo Answers Module

The Yahoo Answers Module will retrieve questions and answers related to any topic you choose from Yahoo Answers and automatically add them to your blog.

YouTube Module

Videos are really hot on the internet these days and the YouTube Module will easily add videos on any topic you choose to your bog on total autopilot. Comments on the videos can also be included as comments on your post.

Flickr Module

With the WP Robot Flickr Module you can create a popular image blog by adding screenshots, images and other media on any topic from Flickr.com to your blog automatically. By using the flexible and powerful MIX feature, you can also add the images retrieved by the Flickr module to any of the other module posts you have.

Yahoo News Module

The Yahoo News Module retrieves the latest news from Yahoo News, which indexes millions of news posts from thousands of important websites every day, which can be posted to your blog.

RSS Module

The RSS Module allows you to add any RSS feed you find to WP Robot and the plugin will post its content to your blog on a regular basis. When you consider the number of RSS feeds out there, you should never run out of high quality content this way.

Translation Module

The Translation Module is different from the other modules in that it doesn’t add any new content to your blog. Instead, what it can do is translate any content created by other modules into many different languages. You can use its powerful multi-translation feature to rewrite posts and create unique content instantly!

Creating a campaign is simple and easy – simply enter your Campaign name and the keywords you want together with the category names and posting frequency and you are in business.

You can then select your post template layout using the “Load Preset” option.

You can view all the pre-made template layouts available on the Templates page and of course you can customize your templates to suit.

There is also an Options page, where you can select your General Options together with the available options for each module you have such as Amazon Associates ID, Clickbank Affiliate ID, eBay Affiliate Id and etc.

You can also see details of all the campaigns that you have setup, including campaign names, keywords, categories, posts created and the date for the next post.

I doubt that there would be any other autoblogging software available that could create autoblogs with more diverse content than WP Robot, which arguably makes it the most advanced WordPress autoblogging software on the market.

WP Robot also has some advanced features needed for autoblogging, such as the ability to cloak affiliate links automatically and randomize the post times to make your autoblogs look more natural. WP Robot can also backdate new posts in order to create to create the “illusion” that a website is older than it is.

Another big plus is that WP Robot is affordable. Many other autoblogging solutions for WordPress charge you a monthly fee to use them or require a large up-front payment, while offering fewer features. Purchasing WP Robot requires a one-time payment and you can then use it on as many of your own websites as you like.

Dave here from FatCowBusiness.com coming to you live from Sydney, Australia!

Just saying G’day to all the SiteSell Facebook Fans! I’m really looking forward to doing a live Question and Answer session with all you guys about “Social Media and Affiliate Marketing”. SiteSell are the creators of the famous SBI SiteBuildIt all in one website building and marketing program. (see our SBI Site Build It Review)

I’ve recently spoken about Facebook, Twitter, Blogging & Affiliate Marketing at A4uExpo in Munich and Affiliate Summit in New York City, I’m a big fan of picking the right content that is in demand, learning from what’s working with your competitors, incentivizing people to click like, share, optin, using Social Media to build your list, and partnering with influencers to really leverage off other peoples followers with things like Guest Blogging. So I’d love to answer any questions you guys have.

The Q&A Session will be on SiteSell’s Facebook Page and you can even post your questions there now at Facebook.com/SiteSell

The Q&A session will be 1hr on Tuesday March 27th at 6PM New York Time, 3PM in LA, 11PM London Time and here in Australia that’s Wednesday March 28th at 9AM Sydney time.

So you can start posting your questions now, and make sure to follow FatCowBusiness.com and SiteSell on Facebook so we can shoot you out a reminder, and I’ll speak to you all soon!

UPDATE: Massive thanks to all the SiteSell Fans and the SiteSell team especially Erin, Christian and Margit for their help and support, and thanks to SiteSell Founder Ken Evoy too, was really stoked to see Ken commented on the video and my ozzie accent.

As a long time entrepreneur and successful internet marketer, I can tell you that online business success requires more than just having a website or a blog. It takes work. You don’t necessarily need to have tech skills or know HTML, CSS, etc., but you do need the proper tools and process in order to achieve success.

SBI Site Build It by SiteSell is one popular program I’ve looked at that provides an ever evolving all-in-one Web site hosting, building and marketing suite of tools. Thousands of people use it and many are doing extremely well. I have been blown away at times seeing how much traffic, high rankings and money people can make with niche sites powered by SBI – see some of the stats on this proof page.

From what I’ve seen, SBI provides a very practical solution for people who want to build an e-business without getting lost or sidetracked with so much to learn. It’s an excellent program for just about anyone really, whether you’re just starting out or maybe you’ve been blogging for a while but just aren’t earning much.

If you have the desire and motivation to earn income on the internet, you would benefit from using an effective, efficient all-in-one system like SBI that will lead you step-by-step to growing an income earning business over time.

SBI first caught my attention when I saw several videos on You Tube that were not only quite informative but straightforward and educational. I have actually showed these to many friends who want to get started with making a website as they explain really simply step-by-step how to build an online business.

For example, take a look at this particular playlist…

This 13-part video series is taken from the SBI Action Guide and walks you through 13 steps to building a successful e-business. Whether you’re blogging or wanting to build a regular site, the info in these videos provides insights into what you may be missing.

While watching the videos, you’ll start to see that the program pretty much comes with everything you need to get started, develop and grow an Internet business. You won’t need to worry about looking for separate hosting and paying for all the usual extra plugins or tools for research. Many of the functions are automated (like SEO), removing loads of technical barriers so you can focus on building your business.

I’ve participated in many online forums. If you have too, then you know that not all of them are well monitored or stay on topic. The SBI private forums, however, are closely monitored and provide tons of friendly, helpful support from other SBI users. It’s full of niche business owners who engage and interact 24/7.

Equally impressive is the fact that you’ll receive unlimited technical support (at no extra charge) with real people to help you and it’s included. All this adds up to giving you peace of mind and allowing you to keep your business moving forward.

Find out more about SBI here. Or if you have any questions that you want answered by someone who is long experienced with SBI, you can submit them via this form and you’ll get an answer from a real person.

]]>http://apeagency.com/seo-facebook-twitter-blogging-for-fitness-and-martial-arts-professionals/feed/0List of Top Group Buying Sites in Australia & Tips for Local Businesseshttp://apeagency.com/list-of-top-group-buying-sites-in-australia-tips-for-local-businesses/
http://apeagency.com/list-of-top-group-buying-sites-in-australia-tips-for-local-businesses/#respondThu, 15 Mar 2012 20:04:11 +0000http://apeagency.com/?p=5459

Group Buying Daily Deals sites can be a good source of new customers for local businesses. You have probably heard of Spreets, Scoopon, Groupon and LivingSocial – basically you give a really good deal, and these sites will feature it for the day and email it to their entire database for that city like Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Perth, Adelaide etc. so your offer goes out to hundreds of thousands of local people.

One example I used in my recent presentation was this Amercian Martial Arts Academy which offered 8 Martial Arts Classes for $19, and Living Social featured it for the day and emailed it out to their database of local people nearby in North Orange County, California.

Whether you are a restaurant or fitness gym, to make this work you don’t just want the customer coming once and using the coupon, the key is to turn them into customers for life, so you want to offer them a special deal when they use the coupon and make sure you get them on your Email or Facebook list so you can keep in touch.

Here is a list of the 8 biggest Group Buying sites in Australia as of Oct 2011, which account for 90% of revenue in industry in Australia according to Telsyte Research Group.

I made this list as I was speaking at my Hapkido Master Fari’s seminar for Martial Arts and Fitness Professionals and mentioned in my speech how group buying websites could be a good source of new clients, so here are some that you guys can contact:

Groupon – the largest Group Buying site in the world has recently launched in Australia. Was the fastest company ever to make $1 billion in revenue.

LivingSocial – the 2nd largest Group Buying site in the world, huge in the USA and Europe and has also launched in Australia

Scoopon – launched by the brothers behind CatchoftheDay, the largest Daily Deals website in Australia. I have talked about these guys Gaby and Hezi as a great example of the power of building and marketing to a list many times in my speeches around the world like at A4uExpo Munich and Affiliate Summit New York City. They recently sold a share of their company to James Packer valued at $200 million.

Spreets – founded by Justus Hammer and Dean McEvoy, I saw these guys speak at the Young Entrepreneurs Unconvention in Sydney and mentioned their story in my speeches around the world at Affiliate Summit and A4uExpo, they build up a database of 550,000 members and just 10 months after they started they sold the company to Yahoo!7 in Australia for $40 million.

Cudo– you may have seen their ads on morning TV and Jaynie Seal actually presenting the Deal of the Day live during the ad!

Deals.com.au – founded by Jeremy Sane a former ANZ Investment Banker, I met him after my presentation at the Affili@Syd Affiliate Marketing Conference in Sydney and he seemed a really nice guy so may be worth getting in touch with him if you need more customers for your local business.

Ouffer – I met the Ouffer CEO Simon Robertson at Affili@Syd and he was also on the Group Buying Panel where they discussed the growth and future of Group Buying in Australia.

This session will outline the best practices for integrating and optimising Facebook campaigns including… How to measure the “influence” that Facebook Ads have on downstream searches and conversions, how to segment and target audiences on Facebook using age, geo, gender to reduce costs. How to increase your click-through rates by making simple adjustments to a creative image, how to avoid “ad blindness” by rotating your ads regularly to boost click-through rates and ROI & finally whether you should keep users on Facebook fan pages or redirect them to your website.

In Australia – 11million users

Fastest growing demographic in US is cougars and grandmas

New Facebook Ad units that are rolling out become more creative

Case Study- Pow Wow Sports

Goals:

Increase Brand Likes

Increase online sales

Increase Email Database

Want to sell home and away Waratah rugby Jerseys

1) Use Keyword Stemming to find Interests

Easily expand your audience with suggested likes

2) Target Friends of Fans

Advanced Targeting – can target people in an event page or app if you are an administrator, or target their friends

3) Expand to Fans of Related Brands

E.g. Rebel Sport, Super Rugby, Waratahs

Leverage off big brands that are already on Facebook

Target people who like “Sonny Bill Williams”

4) Micro Segment Your Audience

Key thing you need to do – segment all your audience, understand your audience, gender, different age groups, education, and MOST IMPORTANT – Likes and Interests

5) Test images before copy

Draw attention to ads with contrasting colours

Link images to audience to increase relevance

6) Keep ads fresh

Finely targeted audience x 4 hours/week on Facebook = Ad Blindness

Rotation = Optimisation

Rotate ads every X days, or as impressions or click through-rate drop

7) Best Practice : Maintain the Facebook Experience

Good examples of Facebook Timeline Pages:

The Highlanders – Super Rugby Team

Nike

Social Influences Search

Consumers exposed to a brand’s social media are 50% more likely to click on paid search ads

E.g. Once you have visited and clicked on something on Asos, they will actually follow you around with banner ads

Rumours around SXSW are that Time Warner’s CNN is in talks with Mashable to buy the social media site for $200 million. Founded by Pete Cashmore in 2005, Mashable has grown into one of the biggest social media and technology news sites on the internet, with over 25 million visitors a month.

Mashable founder and CEO Pete Cashmore is set to be in advanced talks with CNN about the potential buyout. But according to the New York Times, Mashable CEO Pete Cashmore wrote to his staff on Monday about the reported rumours that CNN was negotiating an acquisition of Mashable and said the “rumor going around on Twitter that Mashable will be acquired this week” was not true. But he left the door open by adding in his email “I look forward to updating you guys when we get back”.

CNN acquired iPad app maker Zite last year for $20-$25million but the rumoured $200million takeover of Mashable would be CNN’s biggest acquisition so far.

However there are risks as AOL’s takeover of Techcrunch in 2010 has had problems with many writers and traffic dropping off since, and Techcrunch founder Michael Arrington ended up leaving AOL after feuds with Huffington Post’s Arianna Huffington over Arrington’s venture capital fund Crunchfund.

On the other hand, CNN has one of the most popular news sites in the United States and already syndicates many stories from Mashable so the takeover could really boost CNN’s online and social media presence.

What do you guys think? Will CNN end up taking over Mashable and is it worth it for $200m? How will the CNN-Mashable takeover be different to the AOL Techcrunch acquisition?

As we speak in March 2012 nine buses loaded with 30 entrepreneurs each are heading from various cities around North America to SXSW in Austin, with strangers forming teams on board to create web based companies in just 72hrs along the way as part of the StartupBus Competition. The idea of creating this weekend startup road trip to get to SXSW was created by Elias Bizannes.

YearinPrint - Printable Facebook Timeline

My friend Scott Cowley @scottcowleyau (BDM of OrionVM Cloud Computing) is one buspreneur taking the ride from Las Vegas to Austin, and has teamed up with fellow Aussies Ivan Vanderbyl (who founded testpilot.me) and Bart Jellema (founder of Zeromail) to found a business called “Year in Print” which creates “LifeBooks” or printable books from a users Facebook Timeline.

“Year in Print” with the tagline “Your timeline, in print” is a Facebook/Twitter Plugin which takes the memories posted on Social Networks such as Photos, Status Updates and other posts on Facebook Timeline, Twitter and Instagram and creates a physical “Lifebook” printed book that can be used as a coffee table book or gift for friends and family. Before giving as a gift to your parents, you may want to take advantage of their feature to tweak and remove embarrassing photos.

Support these young Entrepreneurs by helping spread the word on Facebook, Twitter and Google+. Check out what your own LifeBook would look like and check them out at YearinPrint.com and @YearPrint

Plus this week I’m donating all royalties to the Avon Walk for a Cure for Breast Cancer Research as part of #book4boobies so grab a copy from the Amazon Kindle store now and support a great cause (you don’t even need a kindle – download and read instantly on your PC, Mac, iPad or anywhere!).

Here’s a teaser of the description from the Amazon kindle store:

Former NSW Young Entrepreneur of the Year and SMX Idol Winner Dave Cupples shares 7 Secrets for Making Money with Blogging, Facebook Marketing and Twitter for Businesses, along with leading Social Media case studies from around the world and the most effective tools and actionable cutting edge tips, including:

• Tips & Tools for more Facebook Likes, Twitter Followers & Blog Subscribers
• How to spy on competitors and copy their most effective tactics
• How to get maximum clicks and lowest CPC with Facebook Ads
• Most effective ways to incentivize users to supercharge Email Opt-Ins and Facebook Likes
• How to literally grab followers straight out of your competitors database
• Tips & Tools to leverage twitter to get your content shared by influencers
• Best tools such as WordPress Plugins, many free and open source
• How Social Media is changing the web – what actually works and rakes in the $$$ based on amazing examples and unique case studies

And much more!

A must read for any businesses wanting to skyrocket new leads and supercharge revenue using Facebook, Twitter and Blogging.

As I posted earlier this week I have teamed up with a whole group of friends, leading speakers and expert authors from around the world and we are all giving all the royalties from our books this Valentine’s Week to the Avon Walk for Breast Cancer – the full list of books are in my earlier blog post here, support these generous authors by buying their books and LIKING and SHARING this post with everyone you can!

Motivational Speaker Eric Thomas (ET the Hip Hop Preacher) did an amazing inspiring keynote at Affiliate Summit West 2012 Las Vegas #ASW12 (I actually wrote this blog post waiting at San Francisco SFO Airport for my flight home to Australia). Eric had some great lessons and stories how he made it from a homeless dropout living on the streets in abandoned factories during cold Detroit winters to where he is today, a family man having graduated from University, doing his PhD and publishing a book “The Secret to Success”. My favourite quotes were:

““I may have been homeless, but my vision was not”

“It’s not an apple seed, in reality it’s an apple tree”

Here are my notes and some key points from Eric’s keynote:

Eric talks about the importance of environment that you surround yourself in

Eric says “Not how you start but how you finish that counts”

Was homeless, high school dropout, his mum got pregnant at 17 and was out of wedlock and grandmother had 14 children, so she got kicked out and was homeless

Eric was the first one in his family to go to College, took 12 years. Also close to finishing his PhD

“You can start from the bottom and you can still get to the top”

It may not happen in the timeframe you thought it would happen, but when you quit it definitely won’t happen

Eric says “I didn’t get here through academics, I got here because I refused to quit”

His daughter came home with news, she said she made the basketball team. He was thrilled but his daughter thought he would be disappointed as it was only the B team. Eric said Michael Jordan started from the B team, so starting at the same place Michael Jordan did and he made it, Jordan actually got kicked off his High School team, so she’s starting in a better place.

On the B team, you are going to stay hungry and thirsty until you go to A.

What is the first step in changing his life from homeless and a dropout – “seeing something I was not, before I was.”

Eric says – Somebody gave me vision, his Pastor told him – “you have something great in you, you can do it, where you are is temporary, you will not be there for the rest of his life.”

When his pastor told him this, Eric said he is just saying this to be nice, “it’s not possible, no way I will ever go to college, because my daddy and his father and his grandfather did not go to college, nobody in my family every went to college.”

Pastor said “That’s why they call it history, because it’s never been done before. You’re going to make history”

Eric says “Accomplishments came by him believing in me before I believed in myself”

As every time Eric came back to Church, he thought about it, and started thinking, “you know what, he might be right”

Every day you wake up you have to start with that vision

Have a mental picture of where you want to be, and what you want to do.

Eric says “Although my circumstance was homeless, my vision was not. I saw myself in a different place.”

He repeated “I may have been homeless, but my vision was not”

Seeing the Tree not the Seed

Eric shows an image of an apple seed and asks the audience “What do you see?” – People say seed, but it’s not an apple seed, in reality it’s an apple tree.

If you look at this seed and you believe it’s just a seed, that will be your outcome. But it has all the ingredients in there to be a tree, just in its beginning stages.

People get the seed confused with the tree. Some people just see the seed.

Was tough as Eric had a dream to speak and help people but Eric’s wife was an 8-5 working day person, and they had kids to feed and son has asthma so told Eric he needed a “real job” with benefits to look after the soon. But Eric believed this was just the beginning, he could see the tree, his wife could just see the seed. Although in the beginning he got discouraged, wanted to give up and quit.

Information changes situations – Need to have a vision

Passionate about information – a little information changed his life forever. Where he came from in Detroit, more people are in jail or 6 feet under than went to college, difference was he had information that they didn’t have

Eric knew that he needed some information to be successful that was not in that community, so he says “I needed to leave that community to get the information I was going to get.”

What inspired Eric was reading a book about a neurosurgeon who grew up in the same hood in Detroit and similar circumstances like Eric and “walked the same streets I walked”, he recognised all the stores and places in the book. Eric then believed “if he can do it coming from here, I can make it too”

That’s why on the front cover of his book Eric is wearing a Detroit Tigers Hat, so every kid from the hood from Detroit, when they walk past and see that book, they believe “that is somebody like me, that came from the same hood and same circumstances and same background that did it, so I can’t have a victim’s mentality”

What information do you need to know that you don’t know now?

Eric knew he had to hang around a different type of people. Even his brothers in the hood may have been there for him, but they weren’t going to take him where he wanted to go.

Needed to come out of his circle of influence. Use the skills you do have to get the skills you don’t have. Grown up in the hood so has deductive reasoning.

Was struggling in the program at Michigan State University, but saw this kid Todd in class would answer questions and the professor would light up. So Eric reached out to Todd and said where are you from? Todd was from Kansas. Eric said come and have a home cooked meal. Told Todd he really needed help as it was his dream to pass the program.

Todd says sit up front not up the back, as you may sit up the back as you are shy, but the teacher thinks that means you are not interested. Todd also said smile and nod your head when professor says things, also told him to change his outfit.

Todd also said their teacher has read 3 books, so read the books and remember a sentence from each, and when you come to class, question him about what he wrote. Eric asked the questions and the teacher would light up.

Teacher wrote – you are the most improved student in my class. Went from 2.5 to 3.5 and graduated with 3.7 in that class.

Failure is not an option

Say I am not going anywhere until I become successful. Rule called “the show up rule”.

“You can pretend that you care but you can’t pretend you are there”

Eric says “You will never be a failure if you show up every single day”

Come hell or high water, whatever I set out to do, at some point my dream is going to become a reality.

“I have not failed, I have just found 10,000 things that do not work” – Thomas Edison

Everybody has sight, but very few people have vision.

Eric’s vision for 2012 is written down, on paper, every day he spends 5 minutes watching himself putting on his robes and accepting his PhD.

You are not going to be able to make it happen unless you have a dream party every day. You have to see yourself doing it, feel yourself doing it.

Spend 5-10 minutes a day believing you can do it

And for every 1 minute you spend worrying and having a ‘pity party’ you need to offset that with a ‘success party’. So if you complain for 30 minutes, offset with an hour dreaming of what you can do

Working vs Wishing

When you talk about stuff that is one thing, even Eric took 10 years to write his book. He did all the dreaming, but not physically writing the book – the only thing he didn’t do was “work on it”.

Eric says lots of people come to him and say “Eric I want to be a motivational speaker like you and be successful and do what you do”, but Eric says no you don’t – “You want what I have, but you don’t want to do what I do”

If someone grows up in a fluent community, the advantage doesn’t work if he’s not working it

Eric says he may not have money, may not have connections, but I do have the ability to get up and work.

Eric said he was ashamed to tell that it only took 3 months to write the book.

There are things that come to workers that don’t come to people that just wish

The people are getting things is because they’re not spending 24hrs wishing, they are spending 24hrs working

If you didn’t have to work, and other people could get it without having to work hard, your degree would be worth nothing.

He knows great stuff is coming in 2012, as he put in so much work in first quarter 2011, second quarter 2011, all year 2011.

Position yourself

Eric’s favorite parts of Star Trek is when they beam people up, but to get beamed up you have to be in the right spot. Some things happen to people who just show up.

Eric was speaking to NFL players one week, on the days before/after his speech he wasn’t scheduled to do anything, he was just going around with his camera for youtube, when you position yourself properly stuff just happens. Certain opportunities don’t happen from your living room or hotel room.

As soon as he got the bottom of the stairs, the coach says “wow you are the guy from the video! We watch your videos all the time! we would love to have you on campus”

Position yourself rather than pouting. His son is always pouting, daughter is opposite, was crying one day at school as got a B in maths. Son comes home and says got all C’s, so passes all my classes, WOOHOO!

Tells son “You want the finest things, but you’re not willing to work for them”

“You’re not positioning yourself”

Position yourself, stop looking at what other people have and start looking at what they do.

Change not Chatter

You don’t get out of life what you want; you get out of life what you earn.

Whatever you are willing to earn you can get it

At 21, if you asked Eric “what do you want?” he didn’t really know, but he knew what he didn’t want, didn’t want to be in poverty.

You have to want it as bad as you want to breathe

Tells story of a young man, went to a Guru, said “I just want to be successful”

Guru says “Meet me at 5 O’clock”, he says no way, too early

Guru says “Do you REALLY want to be successful”, he says yes, so agrees to come.

Next days that Young Man shows up at 4.59, Sir I’m ready to be successful, the first principle I’m going to give you, we’re going out in the water to learn that principle. He says, I can’t swim, no way and walks away, but then turns around and says OK, I’ll do it.

He was afraid of change, afraid of new, afraid to go out in the deep. Every step he took into the water he was scared and wanted to go back. Then the guru held him underwater and he couldn’t breathe, he fought and fought, after a minute he was almost going to die, then the guru let him up.

Guru said “When you want to succeed as bad as you want to breathe, then you will be successful. When you are willing to get up early and to make every sacrifice, you will be successful.”

You can have everything, but you got to want it as bad as you want to breathe.

I am really proud to be a part of #books4boobies – a whole group of leading Amazon authors have teamed up and giving all the royalties from our books this Valentine’s Week (Feb 12-18 2012) to the Avon Walk for the Cure for Breast Cancer as part of Affiliate Marketers Give Back.

Purchase any of the books listed below between February 12 and 18 and the authors will donate their profits to this great cause. As you can see my book “Follow Me: Making Money with Blogging, Facebook Marketing & Twitter for Business” has just been released on Amazon and is taking part, there are also many other fantastic books all about Business, Blogging, Affiliate Marketing, even Children’s Books, Photograpy Books, Healthy Recipe Books and more!

Help us spread the word about Books4Boobies – click the buttons on the left of this post to:

The only print book in this book fundraiser is: It’s All About the Cookies (Mary Poiley, Missy Ward, and Jen Goode) A mouth-watering collection of recipes and thought-provoking insights affiliate marketers learned on their road to success – an interesting read and a wonderful addition to your own kitchen. There is also an ebook edition here.

Internet Marketing for Business Answers (Jim Kukral) The absolute best way to learn how to grow a successful business is to pay attention to how the experts have done it before you. Internet Marketing for Business Answers, the Small Business Expert Interviews edition puts you into a private one-on-one session with over 16 of the most successful business owners and entrepreneurs on the Web.

Follow Me: Making Money with Blogging, Facebook Marketing & Twitter for Business (Dave Cupples) Former NSW Young Entrepreneur of the Year, SMX Idol Winner and International Speaker Dave Cupples shares leading Social Media case studies from around the world and the most effective tools and actionable cutting edge tips for businesses to skyrocket new leads and supercharge revenue using Facebook, Twitter and Blogging. Includes Tips & Tools to incentivize Facebook Likes, Twitter Followers & Blog Subscribers, How to spy on competitors and copy their most effective tactics, Tips & Tools to get your content shared by influencers and much more!

Facebook + Email = Success (Deborah Carney, Vinny O’Hare, Dave Cupples and David Iwanow) This book is a guide on how to make money on Facebook by combining fan pages with email marketing. *This is a transcript of a roundtable discussion between affiliate marketing experts and facebook experts* Three of the four have spoken at the largest conference focused on affiliate marketing in the US, Affiliate Summit. Dave Cupples traveled from Australia to New York City to speak, and has now spoken around the world.

SEO for Blogs (Deborah Carney, Vinny O’Hare, Eric Nagel, Tricia Meyer) This is a transcript of a podcast, we know a lot of people prefer to read and not necessarily listen. Included are 17 pages of SEO basics that even some experienced webmasters may have forgotten. At the end of the book is a resources page with lots of great references for you to implement the tips with.

Woofer Works Out(Leslie Nazarian, Sharon Nazarian) Get kids excited to move and exercise with this illustrated rhyming book that showcases activities and sports for every season.

Winnie McGoo’s Museum Adventure (Leslie Nazarian, Sharon Nazarian) A museum can be an exciting place. Just ask Winnie McGoo. Whose adventure in a museum one night isn’t something many people do. From eating pizza with Mona Lisa to swimming on the Isle of Grande Jatte, Winnie’s museum adventure creates an interesting plot.

Block Boy (Alec Ababon) Short story about a boy that is different from the others and is bullied in school.

Valentine Quotes and Love Poems (Elise Beckett) Valentine’s Day Love quotes and sayings combined with images of romance, sweets and flowers for your sweetheart on valentine’s day. This book of love quotes and poems from Elizabeth Barrett Browning, William Shakespeare and others is like whispering sweet nothings into your lovers ear.

Of Roses and Love (Floral Beauty) (Shawn Ingram) Roses are one of the greatest of the floral creations. They are timeless in beauty and forever tied to romance. Of Roses and Love has been created in the format of the old print coffee table photo books combining photographs of roses with quotes and verses related to love.

Lilacs A to E (Lilacs A – Z Series) (Deborah Carney) A series of books that identify full color images of Lilacs. All images are correctly identified from tags that were attached to the bushes at the time they were photographed. Due to the size of the completed books, we have broken Lilacs A to Z into four books, varieties that start with A through E, F through L, M through Q, and R through Z.

An assortment of other books:

Sweet Indulgences (Heather Romiti) Sweet Indulgences offers Classic Dessert and Girl Scout Cookie flavored Smoothies, along with Holiday Favorites. These smoothies are especially helpful if you still want to enjoy your favorite desserts but are trying to cut back on fat and carbohydrates.

Slay the Demons (Daniel Fogg, Deborah Carney) When a random act of violence forces him to hide a corpse, Brent Fischer finds himself confronted with horrors long forgotten and horrors he longs to forget. In the end he must either face down his demons once and for all or let them chase him off a cliff. Sex, Drugs & Murder

Join some of YouTube’s rising stars and Premium channel creators as they share some of the best practices that will lead to success and financial rewards on the largest video sharing site on the internet.

RJ Williams – TV Shows don’t necessarily translate to being successful on the web if you just make it the same. On the web and youtube – people like snackable content, better to have 2 minute bites than an hour show like Television, so people can go exactly to what they want to see

Felicia Day – need to do social networking, press, interact with people on a social level, that’s what you need to do to get scripted content to work on the web. Your work starts after you make your videos. Has 45 crew members and 200 extras, takes lots of prep for scripted content.

Says LA is very expensive to shoot scripted, very high location fees. Easier to do scripted productions in Austin, Portland, other cities.

Philip DeFranco – very hard to do scripted content, as very hard to run a company on an [insert blank CPM], Phil says really easy to do unscripted which is why he has done it

Bernie Su – The actual scripting / writing is cheap, but the execution is usually expensive. But may be able to construct it to fit on a smaller canvas using a room or two. If less people and space the economics can make sense. Says even TV series must fit a certain budget like $1-5m, so you can’t do the Matrix every week, but you can do something like CSI which is set in a lab.

Goal may be something else, you may want to showcase your talent, then views doesn’t matter so much, more who sees it like agencies and producers.

More advice from the panel:

Felicia Day – A lot of personalities on Youtube – they are saying something unique that is not found in other places.

RJ Williams – Youtube is about catering to a specific niche audience and getting a loyal following, use youtube insights to see who your audience is.

Different to traditional television, community talks to you and leaves comments and tells you what they like and what they don’t like

Said 90% of their content that showed up high was vampire related, that group that is seeing those type of films like twilight etc are their audience. So put something you know your audience is going to respond to. CW is also popular with their audience, so if they put someone from Gossip Girl, their views would go through the roof. So put things that relate to your audience, not just a random celebrity for the sake of it.

Philip DeFranco – Use playlists – once the content stops it goes to the next one

Youtube is huge on mobile

Xbox apps – 50% mobile or on an Xbox system

The less steps for people to watch your content after you have that person hooked into your audience the better, whether it be playlists etc, that’s how you get lifers, the people that really care about your content and want to consume it at any time

Phil says they focus on merchandise, does better than adsense.

Says a big thing for mobile will be playlists working properly

Merchandise can be huge if working with the right company

For people starting out, should they start as a personality or be episodic?

Felicia Day – says the success of the Guild was because she was a personality behind the show, personally said every blog entry, responded to all the comments, started on youtube and grew big on youtube, moved to xbox. What makes something successful on youtube is that the community comes first, so new ways to interact with people like twitter, Facebook allows you to maintain connection with community. So even when show was moved off Youtube the Facebook/Twitter communities allowed her to keep the connection and keep interacting, so it didn’t feel like she took the show away and they couldn’t interact with it

Great to have an advocate person for them to latch on to

Shouldn’t be just feeding an anonymous mass a piece of content, Felicia says the reason she does it is to interact with the audience and to have that one on one connection.

Bernie Su – for longer feature film content, may be better to keep in under wraps and try to find a distributor or take it to film festivals

RJ Williams – once you get a couple you can create a sizzle reel, once you show how you have been embraced by other people, people will want to be a part of it. Hard to get someone like Justin Bieber on board straight away, but try and start with someone in your niche, someone smaller and try for a snowball effect. You want to start by creating content and good content, if you don’t have a track record and haven’t produced anything it is tough as people only want to work with the top tier.

Bernie Su – Get better with what you can control

Felicia Day – people who are celebrities get asked to do interviews and things all the time – what are you offering that is fun and unique, that is different from everyone else? That will help get an audience?

Tips for converting views into subscribers

Post regular content so they expect to see it in their screen

Call to action

Felicia Day – have people invested, The Guild people knew they wouldn’t be able to make any more without some donations via PayPal

RJ Williams – Content is Content. It’s not about being on television, the content is all over the place, on your ipad, on the television, mobile

Bernie Su – regarding the call to action to subscribe, at the end of the video, many people would say “hey if you like this video” and would point in the air above them to the subscribe button, you will get notified when we have a new videos. Even scripted content channels do this, at the end of each episode, they come on as themselves as the actor and talk to the audience and ask them to subscribe and like and do all these things. So not unusual at all to say, if you want to see more, please do X.

Philip DeFranco – This is another example of showing the personality of the characters. Youtube is 90% personality based. People want that connection.

The future of Youtube

Margaret Healy – 60 hours of new content a minute.

Bernie Su – wants to be able to do more with annotations, wants to be able to do more seamlessly than just connect to other videos. Would also like to see mobile youtube apps have a more robust annotation system like what you see online.

Philip DeFranco – wants to see more robust features on apps, mobile devices, xbox and subscriptions working 90% of the time.

Felicia Day – at the end of the day, everybody is starting from zero with their new channel. Interesting to see how people with big numbers of subcribers grow. Says she is not a gambler but gets a thrill like gambling when she releases a video, as can’t wait to see what people like. No matter how many ad dollars you put behind it, there is an amazing grand democracy to send the video out and see what floats to the top.

RJ Williams – Youtube made it very clear that they are just the platform. Content creators are given the power as they understand the audience and what you want to see. We are in control of our own network, if views/subscribers aren’t there, if shows aren’t working. So you as the content producer will be the one cancelling or producing the shows, not being told what to do by the network, so you are in control of your own destiny. Would love to a feature for subscriber only content, so can have something that only people who subscribe to your channel can see.

Question was asked about asking the viewers to pay to produce the content, rather than businesses sponsoring it. Felicia said hard to make crowdsourcing to work for scripted content, says the Guild was unique as already established and a sponsor was willing to jump on board. Constantly changing with who has money to give you and what their goals are.

RJ Williams – we haven’t seen a massive smash hit on youtube that’s been as big as a mainstream movie of TV series, but somebody is going to hit it

I interviewed ClickBank Super Affiliate Miles Baker from ClickScoop.com who gave tips on Using Facebook & Twitter to Promote ClickBank Products. This was filmed LIVE at Affiliate Summit West 2012 #ASW12 at Caesar’s Palace Las Vegas.

Miles has been making money promoting Clickbank products for many years now and some of you may recognise him as his story and videos have been featured on Clickbank.com

Miles talked about using products such as Tweet Adder to automatically follow relevant users on twitter (and automatically unfollow those who don’t follow you back) to build a list of targeted customers, so you can then sell Clickbank products on Twitter and also lead people to your website to build your email list using Twitter.

Miles also gave some tips about using Facebook to promote clickbank products, including creating relevant Facebook Fan Pages, driving traffic to them using Facebook Ads, and getting traffic to your website and building your Email list through Facebook to promote Clickbank products.

Massive thanks to Miles for coming on FatCowBusiness TV, was great to have you!

For more Clickbank Tips and info from Miles check out his site ClickScoop.com

Jeremy Schoemaker aka Shoemoney gave a great closing Keynote at Affiliate Summit West 2012 Las Vegas #ASW12. The main theme from his speech was “Be willing to do what others are not”.

Many of you guys who saw my speeches at A4uExpo, Affiliate Summit and Affili@Syd may remember I talked about Shoemoney’s Facebook Ad Board study, and his amazing story how he was 400lbs and massively overweight, $50,000 in debt, smoked 2 packs of cigarettes a day, unemployed, lonely and played multiplayer games for 16 hours a day … Then he met the woman of his dreams, lost the weight, and got into internet marketing and just 3 years to the day after he made his first dollar online, he had $10 million in the bank.

Here it the video and below are all my notes from Shoemoney’s keynote:

Tells story about girl Melissa he liked in school, he would buy her jewellery, everything, but got denied. She wanted to go see a dog and he bought the dog for $250, then she traded the dog for pot!

Best Buy Refund Scheme

Shoemoney was working at Best Buy, for these speakers the employee cost was $75, sold for $379

He was going to buy at employee price, then give it to a friend and get him to take it back to Best Buy for a refund at full price, it worked

So after 50 times doing this he had a completely decked out home system at 19 years old. But Best Buy had this whole investigation going on as they were missing hundreds of thousands of revenue, it was actually these store managers doing something else. Shoemoney befriended a person investigating and told him what he was doing, Best Buy didn’t like it.

One day working at BestBuy Shoemoney is told to go out front, the Police are there waiting so Shoe got busted and had to go to court, had to borrow money and get an attorney.

Attorney says you never declared a value, you didn’t break any rules, Judge says:

– Best buy has no policy on refunds

– People who refunded the product never declared a value

– They didn’t break any rules

So you are not guilty, and Best Buy had to pay back for the 9 months wrongful dismissal

Because of Shoemoney, now Best Buy made a Nation Wide Policy Change – you have to show ID and they give you the lowest price it ever sold for

Recently, on phone with Melissa chick from High School again, she says tell me what exactly you do to make money, he says I make sites that add value to people. Melissa says, I want to get started, “I don’t even have Facebook installed yet”

Catholic Church – Shoemoney says religion is perfect business model, only one can be correct, and if you are wrong, no refunds

Obstacles at the moment – Affiliate Nexus Tax

Shoemoney started learning online using forums like DigitalPoint and WickedFire

“Be willing to do what others are not”

Bill Gates – Sold DOS to IBM before he had even written one line of code. Was willing to do what others were not

Steve Jobs – Says Steve Jobs started by ripping off Xerox, conned them into letting him borrow his computer, completely copied the code over and that was the first Mac OS

But how will Bill Gates and Steve Jobs go down in history? They don’t go down for that, they are remembered as some of the greatest technical people and successes of our time. Bill Gates will be remembered as this great philanthropist and incredibly brilliant guy. But they started because they were willing to do what others were not willing to do

John Chow – Shoe gave the example of John Chow, who makes $40,000 a month with his blog called “I Make Money Online by Telling People I Make Money Online” – he is willing to do things people are not.
John’s site says when you sign up through my affiliate link for Hostgator, I will install WordPress and install all the plugins I use (then John pays some monkey $5 to do it)

Google Adwords – Another example was Shoemoney used some tricks with his Google Adwords Ads like using foreign characters and putting tags in his Google Adwords Ads which made certain text bold. People say – you will get banned if you do that, but he never did.

Microsoft AdCenter – the way they used to determine quality score was they would just let you do as many keywords as you want and they just dropped non-performing ones. So Shoemoney had 30 accounts and uploaded all the keywords that had been used on CNET – which was 22 million keywords. People said – they will ban you and come after you – but Microsoft actually called Shoemoney in and made him a consultant.

Facebook Ads – Even with Facebook Ads, Shoemoney pushed the boundaries with sketchy Russian dating ads. Again, instead of getting in any trouble, Facebook actually called Shoemoney in to be a consultant.

Seems like there are new opportunities every day, like:

Retargeting – seeing 80x ROI on products

Back to the story about Melissa, she got in touch and said “I think I missed the boat, too much competition now”. But when Shoemoney launched AuctionAds in 2007, there were 8 other companies doing the same thing. Had to find creative ways to get users. (This is a good point, I think entering very competitive markets can be very lucrative if you can find new or creative ways to get new customers).

AuctionAds

Shoemoney’s company AuctionAds would pay out net zero payments, so they would effectively pay affiliates after 30 days, even though eBay didn’t pay for 90 days. Got the big boys like John Chow to push his campaigns.

When AuctionAds was sold, they had 25,000 active publishers, millions in revenue, and made 2 employees millionaires overnight.

Leaving Points:

– Recognise the opportunity

– Be willing to do what others are not. That is the difference between people that are successful and those that are not

PopupDomination WordPress Plugin is the best and easiest plugin for instantly adding a popup email signup form to your WordPress blog. You can choose which pages for it to appear, customize whether the popup appears after a few seconds delay, and it is compatible with Aweber and all the biggest email providers. You simply MUST have an email subscribe form on your blog. That is the asset you are building and the value of your business RIGHT THERE. If you ask successful bloggers where they are making money – it’s from Regular Readers, Autoresponder Messages and Broadcast Emails to their database. John Reese says emailing your list is like going to your own personal ATM cash machine. Putting your signup form down the bottom “subscribe to our newsletter” does not work, I have unfortunately done that on a few pages, thousands of visitors and no-one signs up. The best way to get the MOST email signups is to pop it up in their face and force them to make a decision. PopupDomination is a very easy tool to add this popup to any WordPress site, makes a HUGE difference and increases subscribers by 500% usually, so check it out. Michael Dunlop the creator has some great bonus tools as well including “how I make on average $6 per new email opt-in in the first week”.

Dave here from FatCowBusiness.com coming to you LIVE from Affiliate Summit at Caesar’s Palace in Las Vegas. My friend Justin Rondeau from HighImpactDesigner.com who did an awesome speech on “Community, Conversation, Conversion – Social Tips You Need”.

Justin gave us 3 tips for Businesses to improve their Facebook Marketing:

Fan Gated Content – with a clear call to action – like us for a whitepaper, like us for a coupon, adding a lead gen form, make this the default landing tab

Edgerank – Improve your Edgerank so your updates actually get seen by post varying content at different times, 90% of fans see in feed only

]]>http://apeagency.com/video-facebook-fan-gate-edgerank-sponsored-stories-tips-live-at-affiliate-summit-with-speaker-jtrondeau-asw12/feed/0Affiliate Marketing in the Age of Social Media by @DaveTaylor at Affiliate Summit West 2012 #ASW12http://apeagency.com/affiliate-marketing-in-the-age-of-social-media-by-davetaylor-at-affiliate-summit-west-2012-asw12/
http://apeagency.com/affiliate-marketing-in-the-age-of-social-media-by-davetaylor-at-affiliate-summit-west-2012-asw12/#commentsTue, 10 Jan 2012 04:25:44 +0000http://apeagency.com/?p=5264

Image Source: AskDaveTaylor.com

Dave Taylor, the man behind the famous blog AskDaveTaylor.com (Twitter @DaveTaylor) did a fantastic talk at Affiliate Summit West 2012 #ASW12 at Caesar’s Palace Las Vegas about “Affiliate Marketing in the Age of Social Media” on Tues Jan 10 at 2pm.

A few years ago, affiliate marketing was all about building a Web site or launching a blog and gaining readership. Today it’s all about Facebook, Google Plus, Twitter. What are the NEW best practices?

Dave has been paying his mortgage with Affiliate Marketing for over 6 years now

With Social Media, it’s not about SEO any more, it’s about relationships

Google changed search results this morning, you will see results based on what you have liked on Google +

Problem – People are Social, Affiliate Marketing isn’t

Maybe not all purchases are online, but the web impacts 50% of purchases

Don’t want to be a commodity space which is based on price.

But many people make purchases without caring what it costs. Like cars, Dave says he drives a $50,000 SUV, didn’t stop and say but I can get the same thing with a different logo on it for $38,000. Even if you buy a house, the price only gives you a range, you really pick the house that is in the best area / best amenities for you, there is a whole lot more than price.

If everyone is selling the same thing in the same way with the same marketing collateral and same images, its not wonder Google says they all suck. Way to get out of it is to start looking at the social side

Social Media is Popular … 1/5th of time spent online is using Social Media. Even Myspace still has millions of users, Justin Timberlake is an investor and is here at CES pimping out Myspace and their new features

The numbers are huge:

Pinterest – visual social media site, in the space between Facebook and flickr, putting photos of your products there is a whole new way to drive interest

Whole Foods Market – does a really good job on pinterest, put up photos of the food they made, ingredients from whole food

Facebook – 800 million monthly active users

Youtube – 800 million monthly active users

Zynga – 232 million active users

Twitter – 230 million users

LinkedIn – 135 million users

Groupon – 115 million subscribers

Google Plus – 62 million users

Pinterest – 6 million users

We are all using social media to make purchase decisions

How do successful affiliate marketers sell their affiliate products so easily – nuture a trust relationship, then people will listen when you go to sell something

62% of people trust family, friends and contacts for recommendations of brands or products

We have the cheapest prices is not as good as “7 of your friends buy our products”

Facebook will show you an ad, then it will show you your friends that have liked that page/group or support that company of have brought that product

When you see, 3 of your friends like this, you catch on and pay attention, that is tapping into the social media side of commerce and transactions

The most valuable asset that amazon has is this extraordinary database of customer reviews

Gmail and Google Plus did the whole ‘invite’ and scarcity thing, this happens in Las Vegas, people walk past all the nightclubs and the one that has the biggest line people think must be the best and want to go in

Active Social Media users are:

– 19% more likely to attend a sporting event

– 45% more likely to go out on a date

– 75% more likely to purchase music

– 47% more likely to purchase

Facebook Memeology 2011, stuff people were most interested in:

No.1 was death of Osama Bin Laden, most talked about even

Google Plus Posting Ripples

Google will show you the graph when you get something re-posted or +1’d and republished. This is a graphic representation of how someone can write about a product and have it gain way more visibility than just from its own little world of followers

Linkedin is great as it shows you your overall circle when 3 connections wide. So Dave could get exposure to 14million people even though he only has 1400 direct connections, if some of them repost on

Bazaarvoice.com Social Commerce Statistics

12 times more frequently people will trust consumer reviews than descriptions that come from manufacturers

90% of consumers online trust recommendations from people they know, 70% trust opinions of unknown users

83% of online shoppers said they are intested in sharing information about their purchases with people they know, while 74% are influenced by the opinions of others in their decision to buy the product in the first place

Word of mouth is still the number one influence in their electronics (43.7%) and apparel (33.6%) purchases

If people are signed up for your affiliate program and actually making sales (unlike 90% of affiliates), give them something special, demonstrates they are one of the insiders and makes them feel special.

What Groupon and LivingSocial need to do is empower the merchant to create a relationship with the customer, but they don’t want that, they want to keep the relationship with the merchants

Merchants with Groupon & LivingSocial have to figure out how to turn this one time transaction into a relationship with a customer. Should say the Groupon deal gets you in the door, but to do the deal need to sign up for the loyalty program then get discount on next meal.

Company has an mobile idea – will warn you on your mobile if you are drifting out of your lane, as they figure you must be on your mobile, positioning it as a way to use your mobile while driving!!!

Proximity and geolocation are huge trends, as you are on your mobile it will say here is a deal for this local business nearby

Top Social Shopping Trends

– Sharing items on Facebook, Google Plus, Twitter

– Social Media fan offers

– Real-time deals

– Free shipping is huge, Amazon pushes really hard for you to get the free shipping, they still have the $25 minimum

Top Online Retail Trends

– In-store pick up

– Mobile apps

– User generated video

– Social networking participation

– Daily Deals / Flash sales

– Deal aggregators

Even when people are in a restaurant, they post a photo of their food, and people post, wow that looks fabulous where are you

Bumped into this great quote on PokerAffiliateSolutions.com “Every motivated online marketer needs to be on Twitter, Facebook and other social media outlets by directly engaging and informing their members. Nurturing these relationships is the key to success”

Your business is about the relationships you have, and your ability to create and nuture their relationships. If you think this is about data and templates, you are going to be more and more irrelevant

Successful businesses are all about relationships, that is what will differentiate successful businesses

Misquote of John F Kennedy nailed it “Ask not what your customers can do for you, but what you can do for them”

– $X for XXXX Clicks – say I am willing to pay an extra lump sum for affiliates who drive more than XXX clicks this month

Missy – Problem – programs don’t allow your rising stars to be able to win something. If you can create that type of promotion that also helps motivate them.

Jared – find a way to target the full range of affiiates you have. Engage the middle ground as there are individuals there that are untapped and can be star affiliates so get them as part of your bonus program

Pay for Placement

Missy – $XX for THAT Spot – I am willing to pay an extra lump sum for THAT spot on your website

Can pay fee, or just pay them upfront in lieu of their commissions, you need to know who you are dealing with

Jared – Focus on large brands, try to get on home page

Bonus Structures

Flat Contests

– Single largest sale

– Most improved affiliate

– Highest Single Commission

Missy likes to do incentives so pretty much any affiliate can win something

Raffle Contests

– One Entry Per Sale Generated

– One Entry for Unique Post / Contest Page, can create an entry for entry time they put up a blog post that has all the details they want covered

Jared – likes First Sale Bonuses, as gets them going, but could be better to do on 2nd or 3rd transaction so they are not just testing

Standard Setups

– First Sale Bonus

– Tiered Bonus

– New Costumer Bonus

– Emerging Channel Bonus – can do contest just for mobile traffic, or maybe via any sort of Social Media if you want to get your feet wet in a new channel

Prize Worthy

Experiences

– Cash is King

– Paid Trip to HQ for Top Performers

– Paid Trips to Affiliate Summit / Industry Conferences

Educational Time

– IT Tech Time

– Personal Site Evaluation

– Mentoring at Affiliate Summit / Industry Conferences – like the Affiliate Summit newcomer program where new people can get a mentor to take them around

Prizes & Gifts

– Pay Site Hosting Site Registration or New Software for 1 Year

– New Hardware, AMEX Gift Cards

– Your Product/Service for Free/Discounted

Small things like paying for their hosting don’t cost that much but they would really appreciate it

Jared – Even hardware, affiliates work on all these netbooks and devices, can give them one you’re your logo when it boots up, you can get it cheaper than they can through your corporate deal with Dell / HP etc, whenever they touch that keyboard, they will think of you, makes much more of a difference than money

Missy – Cash is King though – as many affiliates getting started so while $200 mouse may be cool, many esp mum bloggers could use the cash to put the kids in soccer etc

Do spot promotions, doesn’t need to be for everyone just a group, knowing what motivates them and having that connection is what is going to put you in the front of their brains instead of their competitors

Jamie – Providing your service to them for free, there is really no way for affiliates to really know your product and what it does then to use it, so they can get to know it and review it properly and give honest feedback and know how to promote it better

Non-Traditional ‘Bonuses’

– No reversals Month – but doesn’t work in all industries, Jared sells $5000 mountain bikes, commission $250 so tough to say wont reverse that. But can say if the commission is less than $50 we won’t reverse it. Or can say, look we found fraudulent sale for that $75 commission, but if you make a few more sales we will bonus you that $75

– Provide Site Traffic (via customer emails)

– Increased Commission during Product Launches – and for those that ended up promoting the product can keep their commission up

– Giant Checks – Lindsey said Shareasale hands out giant checks to top affiliates, gets them some press but more about relationship building

A lot of Affiliate Managers miss this opportunity – Customers, if they are buying from you and love your brand, remind them that if you love our product you can also sell it and become and affiliate, and remind them by the way we also have a promotion for affiliates going on

Also there are some heavyweight bloggers that if they put anything on your site you get good results

Promote the Promotion

Advertisting Opportunites

– Network Ad Placements

– Placement on Active Bloggers Site

– Pay Per Click

– Affiliate Directories

Email Notifications

– Affiliate Newsletter (in the network)

– Company Newsletter

– Also cross promote with other peoples newsletters

Jamie and lifelock use their company’s newsletter as well, reaches a broader range of people as not just your affiliates but also send out to your customers, employees to reiterate your promotion

Analyse the Results

(Sale + Engagement)(Traffic + Branding) / (Cost + My Time) = Value

Missy – keep in mind was the promotion that you did right for your business? Take into consideration all the time you spend getting the word out, advertising, when you lay out all the numbers see did it work for the business or are you looking at lifetime value of the customers that you are potentially bringing in

Jamie – Double your commission campaign – was a success but brought in a lot of fraudulent orders, if they could do it again they would do it for top affiliates only

Missy – or you may hit your goal by getting customers that are just one time customers that won’t buy again, there is also credit card fraud, you need to look at the analytics properly

Jared – gets his Sales Reports from ShareaSale and puts them into Excel to compare what is happening month to month, like you can see certain months are peaks so you can prepare and make a promotion for it. You can see the peaks and the valleys and the cycles, so you can prepare for them, can get a promotional calendar set up.

Help merchants understand your business/marketing model so they can better support you

Read, respect and follow network and program T&Cs – if you don’t like them, question them, find another merchant whose terms you can live with

The actions of a few definitely affect the reputation of the many

PPC bidders, cookies stuffers only last so long

Tricky – as for other channels, you can say how much will we spend on CPM – $50,000, but you say how much will we spend on Affiliate, and answer is it will depend how it goes.

For affiliate you have to put a big guestimate, bad if the budget gets blown with bad quality traffic

Companies need to advocate for affiliates, as the merchants think why spend this money on this person we don’t know. So when you do get that communication with the merchant, respect it.

How can affiliates do better?

Don’t just call and ask for a better payout, just call up and ask how they are doing? Ask what you can do better. Build a real relationship with them as you can do things with that relationship, as when you call they know who you are. With that relationship you get things that you don’t get if you are just driving traffic and just collecting a check. You may get an email before things change with the program that no-one else knows, may get your own discount codes, access to programs being trialled before everyone else, they can increase your payout

People like to do business with people they genuinely like and have had a nice conversation with, so don’t be afraid to reach out via phone, skype to affiliate managers

Make sure datafeeds work properly

Make sure creative loads appropriately, don’t have restrictions, best to have no limit to the amount of creatives a merchant can upload

Shareasale – puts their merchants out there

Your network will go away if you are being a barrier to the merchant / affiliate relationship

They see a high volume of applications come through with fake details

Affiliate Networks shouldn’t just do tracking, they have a bigger role than just tracking, they should help with screening

Small ticketing offer on CJ by a certain merchant, Eric saw it in new advertisers list, signed up and got approved, sent the guy an email, no response, sent another, no response, finally got him on twitter. Turns out the email went to the network, the guy didn’t actually know what the Cost Per Lead was that they were paying to affiliates. Merchant asked how much are they paying when you log in there? Then Merchant says he wants to make a deal directly so they don’t have to use CJ.

Eric – Don’t send me emails if I can’t hit reply and talk to a person. Please read what people say when they hit reply, if you don’t do this, don’t send email. Same with Twitter, read what people are replying.

Incom – Incentive or Cash Back affiliates are mostly not compatible with Cost Per Lead offers, e.g. Insurance or Legal or Auto services leads for filling out a form, any rewards type affiliate with be incentivizing the end user with cash/points and you will get forms filled out with people who are not interested in the service, just want the cash or points

Inappropriateness of affiliate content

Inaccessible (or dangerous) website

Affiliate relying on adware, toolbars, BHOs etc

Lack or response (give them 72 hours)

Strongly negative feedback, on forums, blogs, like on closed groups Geno runs a LinkedIn group on Affiliate Program Management. Merchants can leave feedback on affiliates on shareasale, so other merchants can see

If hired an affiliate program for existing business, if you could base that managers success on 5 measurable things what would that be?

5 KPI’s to Measure Success of Affiliate Managers:

Affiliates Recruited – Number of new affiliates recruited into the program, by starting on an established network you will get a constant flow of new affiliate applications, but this is meaningless without activity index

Activity Index – Percentage of affiliates active in the program over a given period of time

Split testing – method of marketing testing where the performance of 2 versions of landing page are being tested against the other to determine which is best, look at lower bounce rate, better converstion rate

Want to be split testing on an ongoing basis

3 Challenger Pages Tested

Best converting page:

Clear call to action

Testimonials

Clear product headline

What to test

Headlines

Call to action

Page Style and Layout

Images

Description Copy

Prices and Promos

Tools to Employ

Google Website Optimizer

Visual Website Optimizer

Liveball

A/Bingo

PickFu

Vertser

Unbounce

Sitespect’s A/B testing

Five Second Test

Vanity

E.g. Avangate – software affiliate network, has link to A/V testing in sidebar, can split traffic between 3 different landing pages and measure which one works better for you

Hasoffers – in house affiliate program software offers similar tool, allows you to create both landing pages and banners and you can pick revenue per 1000 impressions and optimize it based on a specific metric / result. You can either manually pick the winner, or you can let them automatically display the better performing creative more frequently, like Google Adwords.

ABCs, or 5 ways to spy on competitors

Analyse their performance stats, see which of their creatives perform better

Last minute coupon search, they only search after being on the checkout page and seeing the discount coupon field, they go back and now click on an affiliate link. Macys released in 2010 that they were losing money from this as they have a “Coupon Code” box, they changed it and put a link “Find one now” which links to a coupon page ON MACY’s website, so they check for coupons without leaving.

Pseudo- couponing – when you don’t have coupons, but still being featured on coupon site. Some offered sites lie “free shipping” etc even though this is not offered, people still click through on the affiliate link

Coupon scraping– affiliates harvest the web for coupons and inevitably scrap exclusive coupons meant for specific affiliates. In Aug 2009 buy.at came up with a solution to deal with coupon scraping when one affiliate has an exclusive coupon and another affiliate users it and gets credit. Buy.at created offer central feature, can create coupon and assign to specific affiliate. Original affiliate gets credited. Impact Radius has enabled unique coupon tracking, unique promo code assigned to specific affiliate, regardless of what medium the

Shopbargains on twitter – they just tweet out coupons, and they LOVE when people retweet as it all tracks back when they use the coupon

Adware and Toolbars

Have a TOS clause on Adware

Monitior & Enforce compliance

‘Play Without the Ball’

Resources

Ben Edelmen – benedelmen.org

Trademark Violations

When go to Google and search for a brand, one of the first things you see in Google Suggest is reviews, like “BigCommerce Reviews”, in the first page there are domains that have these keywords “bigcommerce reviews” like bigcommercereviews.com is on the first page. This merchant prohibits trademarks in page search, but they don’t prohibit people using these type of domains.

Do not call it a violation unless you’ve definited in as such in your TOS!

How to Police:

iTrademarkBidding – itrademarkbidding.com

Brandverity Poachmark – bradverity.com/poachmark

SearchMonitor

AdGooroo

CitizenHawk – for trademarks in domain names

FTC Compliance

FTC charged a merchant $250,000 for deceptively advertising through online affiliate marketers. Merchant in USA but majority of affiliates overseas. They recruited review ad affiliates who posted endorsements as articles and posts and received a substantial commission in return, charged with disseminating deceptive advertisements

FTC rules on endorsements / testimonials, any affiliate relationship is deemed as a sponsor relationship and relationship must be “clearly disclosed by marketer”

Here are some tips from the Affiliate Summit West 2012 Keynote by Jon Spoelstra, President of New Jersey Nets at Caesar’s Palace on Mon 9th Jan 2012:

Jon was President of New Jersey Nets NBA team. They did direct response only – if they couldn’t measure the response, they didn’t do it

They sent out 70,000 letters to a list of people that had attended Nets games, for every $1 cost to print and mail they get $10 back

Did 6 of these before the season and the ratio stayed the same

Asked a team that spent $6m a year, he said how much does that result in ticket sales? They said we don’t know, we just do branding

Steve Jobs – excited when the players could fit 1000 songs, other execs said why would you want more than 12 songs on a device? Sony invented portable music but missed this one entirely.

Apple makes more money off music than they do off computers, all started as “new is a way of life”

Your antennae have to be up all the time

Didn’t have the best players – signed player Yanka (?) who played 2400mins and never got an assist, Jon says you could put a dead man down on the floor for 2400mins and he would get an assist, the ball would bounce off him go into someone hands and they would get a basket

Jon asked, what is it going to take for us to be able to compete for a championship in 1 year or 2 years? They said money. Jon said, how much more money, says 5 million dollars.

They said to compete for a championship you need 2 superstars, and we only have 1 (Derek Coleman – he wanted it written into his contract that he didn’t have to practice with the team and wouldn’t get fined)

When Jon asks companies “What is it going to take for you to do this?” they always say money, and nobody can ever say how much

Push the outrageous envelope

But vet the idea yourself before you go to someone else, so you have already thought what they naysayer is going to whack you with

Jon said he wanted to hand out jockstraps, wanted to do 500,000 tickets so need 500,000 jockstraps, his colleague nicknamed “Phil the Chinaman” came back and said $3 each, so $1.5m.

News and Bookmark aggregators – great way to syndicate content – delicious, digg, reddit, if you are making great content but not sending it out anywhere, you are wasting your time

Nearly 17% of time spent online in the US is on Facebook

You got to have goals – clear, measurable

Ask yourself the magic question – What value am I adding to my fans? Or am I adding enough value to my fans. Integrate different ways to have fans share things

Don’t spread yourself too thin, there are so many social networks out there, find what works for you and own it. E.g. Justin’s company is focused on Facebook atm, not working Twitter properly yet. Don’t half ass it.

Social Media Network Traits:

Facebook – great for viewing and sharing content

Very casual

Community focused

LinkedIn – for Pros

Much more stagnant, you can build your personal brand and get away with leaving it, you can set and kind of forget

Google+ – Niched knowledge base and social search. You need to use it, if you have a business online get one

Twitter – good for content aggregation and collaboration

Great for content syndication

Brief micro blog

Constant feed of information

Facebook accounts for 95% of social networking time in the US, that’s the juggernaut, the one you should start focusing on

People like faces on Facebook Pages

Victoria’s Secret is constantly updating their profile pictures

How you set your profile up with the picture and the default landing page is absolutely critical in getting someone to like your page

Great example, Red Bull – points to like button

Coca-Cola – has lots of content

Bose – doesn’t quite get the picture, just a text image, they don’t even have a default tab

Crafting your Page

– Fan Gated Content – with a clear call to action – like us for a whitepaper, like us for a coupon

– Default landing tab is 520 pixels, looks awful if you make it too far out

– Profile picture 180 pixels x 540 pixels – everyone sees your profile picture, think of this like a banner ad, encourage people within the image to click through

A visually-rich presentation detailing the 5 industry players, 7 popular affiliate models, 5 tips for choosing profitable topics, 5 web development strategies and 10 tips to get on the fast track.

Here are some top tips:

5 Industry Players

Advertiser / Merchant e.g. bluehost

Affiliates / Publishers e.g. themeaparty.com – party ideas based on any theme you could think of, yogaflavouredlife.com. Affiliate most exciting, as although work to set up, there is a lot of freedom and the customers are taken care of by the advertisers/merchants

Affiliate Network e.g. shareasale, CJ – Provide third party tracking so you can rest assured you can get paid

Agencies, provide setup and management of affiliate programs for companies that don’t want to do in house e.g. Forge, Shaaf, PMG, GTO Management

Hybrid sites e.g. expand2web.com – he recommends BlueHost to clients and makes $90 a commission, also sells WordPress Theme for Small Business, also has members area for people needing help $47 a month, and monetizing other ways as well

Niche Review Site with an Email list – good way to go

Every time they test, best to REMOVE clutter from side columns

Page was converting 2% – then cleaned up the side columns = 9%

Tips to choose profitable products

Cost – look for over $150, e.g. amazon bose wave radio II – Platinum White $349.
Find products that have a decent price point, it doesn’t normally take more work to sell the more expensive products, as you still need to set up all the pages

Brand – well known brand better, don’t want to be selling visitor on the brand

Reviews – check out the product reviews that are being written about that bose radio – on amazon, conversion with suffer if bad reviews on amazon

Merchant – Amazon only has a 1-day cookie, but finds converts good still

Search volume – don’t build reviews if nobody looking for product

e.g. Bose Wave Radio

Create a nice review about bose wave radio. Give all features, benefits, pros/cons, helpful assist them making the decision

Some affiliates from Australia, from Perth rank #1 for 14000 keywords – November – $19000 amazon commissions, almost $50000 in Nov/Dec. Just one nice product review

My Top 5 Website Development Strategies

Use WordPress. EpilepsyMoms.com

Build pages, not sites

Hire professional writers e.g. elance

Avoid clutter at all costs, simple white background, black text

Add YOU e.g. TowableTubesDirect.com. Add your face to the site increases conversions, have about the editor page.

Automate Updates – RSS to Email feature from aweber, every time you add a post to your website it will automatically go out to their email list

James says don’t copy the big bloggers layout with all their clutter in the columns, they make money from their list, the way to go is dominate a niche.

Top 5 Traffic Building Strategies

Google Natural searche.g. piano keyboards, dan’s site is usually 1 or 2, search for brand name dan is up, also Yamaha cp1 keywords.

James says really only 2 things: build great content that is focused on helping visitor, then building great backlinks to those content. Google’s algorithm based almost entirely on other pages backlinks

Press Releases – Prweb.org

Podcasting – WP plugin called blubrry.com. Can publish on other places like webmasterradio.fm, geekcast.fm, instantly you get your show infront of all other audiences, through RSS feed podcast goes to 25 sites on the net plus iTunes

4. Email list

Youtube – Keys to getting videos ranked, Use keyword phrases in the video description – most keywords based on what you write in description.

6. Twitter

7. Facebook – Put you and your website in your twitter/Facebook pic

Top 3 strategies to keep visitors coming back

RSS to Email – if you don’t get people who visit your website to join your email, 70% you will never see them again

2. Podcast

3. Be helpful

3 Analytics Tools

1. Google Analytics– Free, get it on your site, if using WordPress as easy as putting code on a box

2. Crazy egg – lets you view where visitors clicking/ looking on page

3. Clicktale– video tapes the users that come to your page, video of exactly what they are doing, free version you can get 400 videos of visitors free

Tips to get biz on right track:

1. Give Yourself Time to Succeed

Build yourself a virtual team – The biggest mistake people make in this business as they try to do everything themselves, try to do as little as possible. Outsource things that are technical, get someone to write, design graphics etc. If you are not a graphic designer, don’t become one, hire one!

Learn how to outsource. If you can outsource, there is nothing you can’t do, as there is always a pro out there

15-minute rule – if James is working on something and can’t solve in 15 minutes, he uses the next 15mins to outsource it on elance or vworker.com

Do what you do best and outsource the rest

Promote, Promote, Promote – 80% of your time shd be promoting your website not building it

5. Track and measure

6. Work hard and play hard

7. No Hocus Pocus, Just Focus – how many websites do you need to really succeed in this business – just 1. Pruning it down was the smartest thing he has done.

During Q&A

About Google Adsense – James says adsense is not the poor cousin, in some cases Adsense if the perfect fit. If you are focused on a product or review – perfect place for affiliate link. If site is more general content and not a lot of focus, great place for adsense.

Top 25 things webmasters should look at when building a site or evaluating their website performance. Attendees will leave with actionable items to improve their sites with easy to implement steps.

UPDATE – Vinny has just released an awesome book on Amazon Kindle called “25 Ways to Improve Your Website” which includes top tips from this session – download it on Amazon here (and if you are lucky and in time you can also get it for free as part of a special promo for 3 days only from Aug 10-12 2014)

Here are some top tips:

Keywords

Many people just blog and think search engines will pick them up – don’t just do this, target specific keywords.

Try tools like compete.com, Google Webmaster Tools, Snoozle

Wordtracker has a free 7 day trial

Paid tool – Raventools

Colors

Just because it looks good doesn’t mean it is

Title

Keep below 70 chars as after that Google won’t index any longer

Put your keyword near the front

Search engines rank you higher if search term is in the beginning of your title tag

Meta Description

After 150characters it will be cut off and Google will display dots

Keyword in beginning and a Call to Action or Curiosity near the end

Meta Keyword

After you use more than 1-2 keywords, you are almost signalling Google that you are a spammer

Search Engines claim they don’t use this, Vinny thinks they do

Meta Keyword should be the one focus on that page, most SEOs will tell you don’t even bother

Some directories crawl and grab this keyword to

Bing claims they use it to catch spammers

Search Boxes

Normally puts 2 searchboxes on websites, one up the top then one down the bottom

Macy’s, JC Penney has searchbox above the fold where it should be

If you put Google Searchbox, can see in Google Webmaster Tools what people are searching for, then make new pages about these terms

Logos

If building trust you want to have a nice logo, want to make it look good

Always link back to home page

About Us

Customers don’t buy from a website, they buy from you, they want to know that you are trustworthy before they put a credit card and make a purchase

For Vinny, most important page, won’t launch a page without it

Should be easily found, in your footer, probably with a nofollow tag so you don’t waste link juice

Another example of creating trust on the internet

Derek Halpern SocialTriggers.com About Page is great example, all about how he can help the customer

Blog

Permalinks – set correctly, change from p=?35, you want it to be category name or postname or both, Vinny recommends just using /post-name/

Note – The latest version of Wordrpress 3.3 has /post-name/ as one of the options for permalinks now under general settings in your blog

Contact Us Page

Should be making your website so good that people shouldn’t need to contact you

Always let user know how long it will take to get to them, like 12 or 24 hours

Use a contact form to avoid spam, don’t just put your email address there will get spam, many free WordPress contact us plugins

Google did ‘freshness’ update, one of his sites got hit, the site had 7000 subscribers, but site traffic went down 3000 hits a day, he sent one email a day and got the traffic back above what it was

When Google

Offer for free signups, free ebook, e.g. for Travel Website – 10 Best Ways to Save Money on Vacation, even take older pages and freshen them up and put in ebook

Vinny users Aweber, can set up Aweber so every time you make a new blog post it goes out in an email newsletter, can set to do once per week, once per post, or once per 10 posts etc

Use Twitter and Facebook to get people on your list

Uses Twitter to get them on Facebook list, then get them on newsletter list by posting to Facebook

Navigation

Too many, reader gets lost

Control where reader goes, have maybe 5 at the most

Make it spiderable – Vinny sees Javascript Dropdown boxes, which Google claims they can index, but still recommends make it simple html

Backlinks

Find competitors backlinks, email them to try and link to you

Or give them a guest post, with links already embedded

Blekko.com – type in link:competitionwebsites.com and you will see the backlinks

Firefox Add on – Quirk Search Status

Images

Alt Text – Optimize

Picnick.com

Videos

How to videos

Self hosted or youtube

Self hosted means upload to Amazon S3 account, costs pennies, will get billed like $1.63 for a years worth of service

Can host on youtube, problem with embedding those on website, if you show related videos people leave and go to youtube

Note – Youtube now allows you to TURN OFF related videos at end when embedding

Can put a video on about us page

Can have videos transcribed on SpeechPad.com, costs around $1 a minute and you have pages of content

Never have them autoplay when you go to a website

Landing Page

Call to action

No sidebars, No navigation, No other links or distractions

Internal Linking

Whenever Vinny makes website, he makes it link to at least 3 other pages on the site, then you find out if people scrape your content

Set up google alert at least for link:yourwebsite.com and site:yourwebsite.com that way every time you get a link or page indexed in google

WordPress has plugins that will automatically link every time you use “red widgets” to your red widgets sales page

Internal Linking keeps people on your website, Google will probably rank you higher if people click through to 3-5 pages rather than clicking one page and leaving, also helps Google spider your content

On Page Content

Keyword Density – don’t go over the top and put 70% about Blue Widgets, Vinny keeps if around 3%

Cheap hosting is not worth it – many sites were on Godaddy $4.99 plan, when Vinny moved his sites off them his traffic went up 40-50%, was on cheap shared hosting with 20,000 other sites and probably 19,000 of them were porn and spammy sites

Take steps like Picture optimizing

GTmetrics.com – will crawl your whole website, tell you what is slowing down your website

Blogs in Niche

People who comment – great idea for backlink partners

Forums

Link to website is in signature

Also put your twitter, Facebook fanpage in there

You want to become the expert there

Go in there, make maybe 10 posts before you put your signature

Youtube

Build subscribers and friends – builds repeat visitors

As every time you upload video, they get an email and end up back on your site again

Put http:// links, still a nofollow link, but they click through after the video

Leave comments on other “blue widgets” videos

Twitter

Find influential people in your niche, follow their followers

Vinny has Tweet Adder follow everyone that Missy or Shawn has @ messaged in the last 6 days

Users Hootsuite to send out automated messages – can upload a spreadsheet with 50 tweets

Facebook

Google is seeing the interaction

Google indexing Facebook Fan Pages

Facebook are nofollow links not dofollow, but with 700 million people you want some of that

Uses Facebook to get people on Email Newsletter List

Google Plus

Recommend get a business page set up for each website

In time Vinny can see Facebook not mattering as much

Tip – on Google Plus whenever you make a new blog post, instead of attaching the link at the bottom, drop the url with full http:// into the little white box where you write the message, your site will get indexed in Google in 4 minutes

]]>http://apeagency.com/25-ways-you-can-improve-your-website-by-vinny-ohare-at-affiliate-summit-west-2012-asw12/feed/4VIDEO: Social Network Marketing Tips for Business LIVE at Affiliate Summit with Jay Berkowitzhttp://apeagency.com/video-social-network-marketing-tips-for-business-live-at-affiliate-summit-with-jay-berkowitz/
http://apeagency.com/video-social-network-marketing-tips-for-business-live-at-affiliate-summit-with-jay-berkowitz/#respondThu, 05 Jan 2012 10:45:09 +0000http://apeagency.com/?p=5203

I caught up with Jay Berkowitz from TenGoldenRules.com who did a great talk at the last Affiliate Summit in New York and Jay gave us some tips on how to market your business in Social Media using the major Social Media Networks – Blogging, Facebook, Twitter and Youtube.

A few key points:

– Jay mentioned Facebook Ads are a huge opportunity, for 8/10 of Jay’s clients Facebook Ads are outperforming Google Adwords, and it costs less to get a lead from Facebook Ads. I agree Facebook is a great opportunity as there is loss competition and many big companies have not moved in and bid up the prices like with Google Ads.

– Youtube is the No.3 Website in the World behind Facebook and Google, and what many people don’t know is it is the No.2 most popular Search Engine in the world behind Google. So more people are searching on Youtube than are even searching on Bing or Yahoo. So develop how to videos, educational videos, even just answer the Top 10 Questions people ask on your Youtube Channel.

I have a spare Gold Pass for Affiliate Summit ASW12 in Las Vegas, the World’s Largest Affiliate Marketing Conference. I don’t need this pass as I have another Press Pass for ASW12.

So I have decided to give this away for a 100% DONATION Directly to World Vision. UPDATE – Slashed to $250, last chance! Also this is perfect for any #CES2012 people as this is in Vegas just before the International #CES!

ALL PASSES TO AFFILIATE SUMMIT ARE COMPLETELY SOLD OUT – So this is your LAST CHANCE to grab this last ticket!

Gold Pass – normally $749 if they were made availableIncludes – Admission to Meet Market, Exhibit Hall, Keynotes, Sunday educational sessions; access to all recorded session videos; and PowerPoint presentations. This pass does not include access to Monday and Tuesday sessions in person.

I have the reference number for this pass and have double-checked they can transfer it for you instantly and you can pick up your name badge and pass at the conference, no postage required. I am happy to give you the reference number so you can also check with Affiliate Summit before making the donation. I spoke at the last conference and will be there attending ASW12 too. Special thanks to Shawn, Missy and the team at Affiliate Summit who gave me this pass and allowing it to be sold for charity.

Once you make the donation to World Vision there is nothing more to pay, just EMAIL ME the new details for the ticket (Name, Company, Email, Address, Phone and whether you want Affiliate/Merchant/Agency for your Badge) and I will get the ticket changed immediately, that’s it!

You will be making a 100% Donation Directly to World Vision so I do not receive or touch any money, the donation is Tax Deductable too.

You are also welcome to email me dave ‘at’ fatcowbusiness.com or even SMS me on +61422185700 and I’ll finalize the whole thing immediately even if it’s middle of the night in Australia

Hopefully don’t get carried away & end up with a bill like this again, I swear I only ordered the $9 red bull!

Hey guys,

I’m really excited to be going to Las Vegas again for Affiliate Summit West 2012 at Caesar’s Palace! Very grateful to have a Press Pass this time so will be covering the sessions and doing interviews from the Blogger’s lounge!

If anyone is keen to film some video blogs while we are in Las Vegas or just hang out for some drinks tweet me @DaveCupples and @FatCowBusiness would be great to meet up! Especially Past and Present Affiliate Summit Speakers – would be great to do a short 2-3 minute interview with perhaps 3 Tips from your session or about any internet marketing topic.

– Saturday night – there is usually a buy.at party but unfortunately not this year, last years one was awesome! Would be great to get people together out for drinks somewhere though, one suggestion would be PURE Nightclub and Cocktail Lounge at Caesar’s Palace, it is really huge with a mix of dance areas and also quieter lounges and outdoor balconies and sitting areas, plus since it is Caesar’s Palace with the conference we should all be able to get in easily and can probably hook up a guestlist or get free entry from the concierge, let me know in the comments what you guys think or if there are any meetups happening!

– Sunday night – ShareASale Under the Stars Party @ Chateau Nightclub, Paris Las Vegas 8pm – Midnight. The ShareASale parties are always awesome as basically everyone from Affiliate Summit comes down, you just have to pick up a pass from the ShareASale booth at the Meet Market on Sunday from 12-6pm. Last years ShareASale Party @ Tryst was totally awesome, Affiliates were seriously getting down!!

– Later Sunday night – Strike Out Breast Cancer Charity Bowling from Midnight – 3am at Goldcoast Lanes, 4000 W Flamingo Rd. I went last year and it is a totally awesome crowd of lots of the Affiliate Summit organisers, speakers and lots of really nice, friendly and helpful peeps so you should come down. They way they have done it is an awesome idea, bowling is free just make a donation of $25 or more to anyone on the Affiliate Marketer’s Give Back Team for the Avon Walk for Breast Cancer.

Went bowling recently and got my highest score of 210 with 4 strikes in a row, so Australia is looking good this year!

– Monday night – Affiliate Karaoke @ Neopolitan III-IV, Caesars Palace Las Vegas 9pm – midnight. Again awesome crowd and lots of the regular Affiliate Summit peeps go to this one. The last karaoke at Affiliate Summit East in New York was amazing, it was in one of the massive Hilton Ballrooms and people had to sing up on stage. At first I thought no way people will get up there, but every single person in the room got up there and went for it, screaming, dancing – was wild! I shared my experience from Affiliate Summit Karoake when I talked about Living Your Dreams as the Guest Speaker at my High School’s Awards Day @ 11.02 in this Video:

I’ve been really lucky to travel the world and meet lots of inspiring people and I often think, what is it that sets these people apart and makes them so successful? It’s not that they all got a 100 UAI … the common factor is these people have balls, they put themselves out there, and go for it.

Also on Monday Night – From 9.30pm there is the Affiliate Ball @ Crown Theater, Rio Hotel with NELLY performing LIVE, so that sounds worth checking out too!

I also scored a press pass to CES, the Consumer Electronics Show which is the world’s largest trade show so will be staying in Las Vegas until Friday. I’ll make another post of all the #CES12 parties / events shortly, but one awesome event I’ve got my ticket for and recommend is the MashBash Mashable Awards on Wed Jan 11 8pm at 1OAK Nightclub, Mirage Hotel and Casino.

I’m then heading to Los Angeles for the weekend to run the World Vision LA 13.1 Marathon @ Venice Beach on Sun Jan 15 as part of Team World Vision – if anyone would be kind enough to sponsor me that would be really appreciated – my Official World Vision fundraising page is here. I have a very special project coming up that I am launching in LA, so keen to do some videos there too. If any of you Affiliate Summit or CES peeps are in LA or want to run the race get in touch!

Would also love your comments, like any other parties Affiliate peeps recommend for Saturday and Tuesday night? Any anyone keen for filming video blogs? Thinking of filming around the Caesar’s Palace Fountains – any tips for good shooting spots in Vegas?

Can’t wait to see everyone soon @ Caesar’s Palace for Affiliate Summit West Las Vegas! Will be live blogging the sessions and sending out lots of videos and interviews so make sure you LIKE us on Facebook and join our Email Newsletter here so I can send you the free videos.

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Some great Twitter Marketing Tips from Brent Payne’s session at SMX Melbourne Social Marketer Workshop

Has built up 30,000 followers for himself on Twitter

He would create different profiles – Soccer Mum, African Safari Photographer, Business Exec so could talk to himself on forums and create links, worked well until algorithm update

Don’t put Social links in footer, put somewhere where they can see

Formula – Put a number a the start of the post and use the keyword like “Top 10 …”

1/3 of posts need to be emotionally engaging – e.g. sharing that you love Nickelback when its not popular, talk about silly things like Karoake, that’s a way to emotionally connect to your audience, if you are a brand, make them feel part of your company, like latest company outing you had

1/3 shd be intellectual – they get the information that they are really following you for, this stuff can be automated.
Automatically set up using Google alerts, anything that Danny Sullivan writes that appears in Google News he has set up to automatically tweet out

1/3 can be personal/insider info – OK to try and get people to do what you want them to do, as long as you have that balance with emotional and intellectual. People say “can’t promote on social media” – Brent believes you can, just keep it to 1/3

Twitter does help for SEO, once you get certain number of tweets of popular on Facebook, see boosts in ranking, even though they are nofollow they still work

Key factors of Social Rank– Popularity
– Authority
– Relevance

Pay attention to Bing, they are the most open as to how they use Social in their ranking, the others will be doing much the same thing

Tweetcloud – can see what your stream looks like and whether you are on topic

Example of how twitter can build links:

Alyssa Milano said “are you happy” – Brent replied with a picture/graph about “are you happy” and Alyssa loved it and retweeted, it got retweeted by 147 people, drove only 3500 visits but generated 512 links from scrapers, other blogs that automatically post everything Alyssa Media sends out

Twitter Account Types

News feed – Create News feed from RSS. @cnnbrk does this “CNN Breaking News” they don’t follow or interact and send out news. Best to do the best content, cream of the crop, not just everything you create

Employees – Best do not endorse them

Celebrities – they may be your CMO, PR person, public speaker, somebody in your organisation can be the celebrity face of your organisation, like Anderson Cooper @AndersonCooper
Make it a job requirement to have a twitter profile and force to send 3 tweets a day that are emotive about what he is up to

Brand Persona: e.g. Colonel Tribune – Chicago Tribune stole image from Time Magazine, then altered the image hat and wrote Chicago Tribune across the top, legal dept would have had a fit, Brent has said this in public forums like 200 times but no-one cares, says sometimes you need to break the rules. Based on a person Colonel McCormack. He smokes cigars, drinks brandy, people loved it.

Colonel Tribute send outs invites for all the tweetups that we do.

Created a media page for Chicago Tribute which listed the journos twitter handles and this was in the printed version

Engage the Locals = Have a tweetup, had paper hats like Colonel Tribune

Like Match.com you are setting up certain criteria so you can match someone else.

Sun Times did that to Colonel Tribune

E.g. Brent follows everyone with CEO in their profile and they live in Chicago

Can specify # of followers/tweets people have to have- … set min and max to reduce spam

Brent follows all Matt Cutts followers, pisses him off, if they don’t follow back, unfollow them

Also Matt Cutts apparently follows important people like 300 people, so you want to follow those people too

You can also follow by certain lists – list that Danny Sullivan make are awesome lists

Also people that mention your brand, mention your competitors brand

Auto tweets from Google News

Always retweets Distilled from London if they mention “SEO” because he trusts them, timed tweets and scheduled news

Go into Google News, type in a search query that you want, then at the bottom of Google news, there is an RSS feed button, so he will sort by chronological order over past 24hrs for a phrase like “danny sullivan seo” and if google news picks it up, automatically send it out, and hashtag it and @dannysullivan. Like “Hey, great post by @dannysullivan”

Surprise and Delight – reward the right people that contribute to your page, other people see this and then think they may get rewarded, you aren’t promising everything, but you see interactions go through the roof. Just say thanks for all your comments and support, would like to send you something to say thanks! Warner Bros did this.

Another campaign was to win $10,000 had to purchase first

In Australia, skill vs chance:

If you want a game of chance which is drawing something out of a hat, you need permits in every state that people are able to enter and win the competition, may mean going out to every state and getting a permit, takes quite a bit of time. Need to plan about a month in advance. That’s why most of the time go for a game of skill:

– Tell me why in 25 words of less and judge it

– Having a quiz, be careful don’t start out with a game of skill and turn it into a game of chance. Like saying give a correct answer and we’ll pick a winner from those correct answers – that is a game of chance. But saying first person to answer correctly is a game of skill.

– The 25 words of less seems to be the easiest way to get around the permits, be clear what you are looking for – most creative response

Crust Pizza Friday – Tweet I love Crust Pizza Friday and every Friday someone gets 5 pizzas delivered to their work, that is game of chance

Galaxy Nexus Phone – launch of their new phone, globally run competition

Toshiba ran competition on youtube, they put a video on youtube about their latest laptop about the features it had and what features it had, they said put in the comments what you would want out of a laptop in the future. Good way to make people watch your content on youtube and then reward that.

Commonwealth Bank – About to be launched on Monday, competition on Facebook, setting up a challenge, people can win $2000 each day, pay attention to Facebook Page and check back for clues. Still have to wait and see what they do, but they are making people come back and back and keep checking FB page which is a good idea.

Facebook Promotions Guidelines

Unfortunately there is a lot that is illegal, like comment on our page and tell us this to win, or tag yourself in a photo to win, anything using Facebooks native features of functionality is illegal. It gets the most virality and impact and unfortunately we see this everywhere but it is against Facebooks rules.

There are maybe 6 Facebook account managers in Australia so they don’t have time to check or chase anything up, so people are getting away with it, risk they may take down your entire page though. Before – no alcohol as a prize, now you can as long as its over 18.

But you can build an application that will allow people to do that in a same way, does take them to an opt-in, rather than going to an application and voting on it

Other ones on the naughty list:

Competition by SAS airlines– extremely successful, for big airline, but taken down straight away. Asked people to make a profile photo

All I want for Christmas by Westfield – was pulled down within 3 days, but they got massive traffic. Did piss a lot of people off and all anti-Westfield page. When you entered it automatically changed your Facebook status to be this “All I want for Christmas is a Westfield Gift card”
2.7 million views, 14% online sales spike

Gelato place – made gelato burger completely out of cake, gelato etc, they were giving away 6, all you need to do is share our post, image looks so great you would want to share anyway, 271 share in first day for tiny gelato place in Sydney, unfortunately not something you can do

Tony Bianco– said leave a comment in the comments telling us why you should win in 25 words of less, but using FB comments is not allowed

Tiger Airways – also asking people to enter through the FB comments, not allowed

Fan Gating

It does say you can’t like a page as the entry mechanism, but it doesn’t say you can’t make a Fan Gate to get to the competition details

Kellows Big Breakfast Pledge” on Facebook – saying this is a contest that is only open to our Fans, become a fan to get the details is fine, but saying you have to “Like” to be in the draw, that is not allowed

Tools- Wildfire Competition App

Wildfire apps are quite reasonable, pay depending on how much tailoring and formatting, then pay minimal price for how long you want the competition to run for. Could run something for a month for $500 using these applications.

If you want to go around that – you can still use Facebook to promote your competition but have a landing page on your website, but if you ask them for a question and to answer correctly you have to award it to the first correct answer to keep a game of skill not chance, but then people stop entering once someone has answered right, but you can hide all the other comments so people don’t know yet and they keep entering

Make sure the prize suits what you actually want from your audience. Things like TVs are something everyone wants to win, so get all of the riff-raff and not necessarily the audience you want.

Canon had photo competition – many people took exception to the winner

Be the voice campaign they ran for TomTom, chance to be the voice for Tom Tom, but people were complaining, I can’t believe this person got this many votes, much be gaming the system

Most clients just try and make it into a game of skill and avoid the entire thing.

Panda has been an algorithmic chance and doesn’t have manual exceptions applied to it

Some sites with high quality content also affected, it means something on the site has triggered a flag, can be hard to find

How to check for duplicate content

Copy 7 to 10 words from your site and search for it in quotes, your site should be number 1 for that search, if other sites can up there is a problem.

Problems with panda is often copied content can rank above yours.

Can also use this to search for site:youdomain.com “put 7-10 word phrase” and you can see internal duplicate content

Panda is about content and usability

Amit Singal from Google says in the Wall St Journal on Feb 24 the day after Panda “we often measure whether users click the “back” button quickly after visiting a search result, which might indicate a lack of satisfaction with the site”

Usability Factors

– Time on Page – if people spending less than 15secs on page, may be problem if they return to google

– Pages Visited – you may have a problem if no one reaches your deep content except from a search result

– Brand Loyalty – are 90% of your visitors first time visitors from search who never return

– Exit Rates and bounce rates – what are people doing on your high exit pages, if they find the answer that is great, but if the bounce rate is 100% and everyone is going to your site from a search in google, then going back to google and clicking on someone else and never returning to your site, that is the worst signal to send to Google

– Recommended tool Grammarly.com

Usability of website now plays a bigger role than ever – try a site called unbounce

Now you can’t have a million pages, need to consolidate stuff down

Engines don’t want a million “spark plug” pages where the only thing different in model numbers, so consolidate content, block content with robots.txt

Take 10,000 pages of content and put into SEMrush, if you see only 300 that rank, beef them up

Not an answer but can help

– Link Building

– Social Media

Jim’s suggested solutions

Study Google Analytics

Perform a Clicktale Analysis

Author rank / Agent rank will become more important

Also one factor Amit Singal from Google said was “would someone trust this site with their credit card?” Jim says ecommerce sites really need to have every trust seal in the book

Jim says – when 301 redirecting, there is more power if you take the content from the old page and paste it on the new page. Google will compare it to the cached snapshop and pass more power if same content

Brent Payne from BaldSEO did a really awesome session at SMX Melbourne 2011 about Advanced Keyword Research Black Hat Tactics that work so here are my notes from the session:

Topic: Advanced Keyword Research

Speaker: Brent Payne – SEO Director, Tribune Technology

Tribune was spending $1.5m a month on PPC when Brent started, took a lot of that to SEO

Keyword Research Tools

Google Insights for Search – handy for Geo-Specific Keyword Research

Google Trends – updated every hour on the hour, unless you are a news organisation hard to do much with this data, but can use it for your blog posts, and redirecting old posts to new material

301 redirected with “Michael Jackson dead” when at Chicago Tribute. Took all the stories the tribune had about Michael Jackson over the years about his babies, court cases, hair on fire etc, and all dead/death/dying stories and redirected to one page about “Michael Jackson Dead” they were #2 for Michael Jackson Dead – 2.5 million hits in a few hours

Churn your competitor’s keywords to expand your own campaign.

Good to start with smaller tail key phrases then start building those together.

Xenu Link Sleuth to download all their title tags, you can do a pivot table inside Excel, and gives a nice list of what they are mainly focused on,

Create a long tail campaign on your larger competitor’s head terms

Did campaign for pawn shop … pawn shop Atlanta etc, all geo-located with about 2.3million key phrases all the states and cities … CPC cost is about 1/3 of the cost for the head term pawn shop

Used Excel then upload feature to google Adwords editor

Weaker Competitor – Steal their tail

Xenu Link Sleuth, scrape the title and content

Googlebot finds it hard to find duplicate content. If it does, it hides the duplicate from the less powerful site.

If you use the same name and same title tag, the weaker competitor will be hidden.

Black Hat Tactics That Work

Through amazon mechanical turk, paid people 7cents to search for a certain term and click on his result, got “brent payne manipulated this” into Google Suggest

It works well still. Problem don’t get on Matt Cutts or Googles radar as they consider it spam, they got mad at Brent when they found out

Brent also got when you type “Alysssa Milano Brent Payne” he got “Alyssa Milano Br” to appear in Google Suggest … very hard as were lots of people searching for “Alyssa Milano Breasts”

For Mechanical Turk – make it a simple task, no more than 5 steps

Brent thinks 7cents in the sweet spot

What you want to come up in Google Suggest is your key phrase and your brand

If you type in SEO and Social Media … if bald seo was associated with that, wouldn’t that be interesting?

Google starts to think you are very much associated with whatever that key phrase is, plus you start to get a tonne of traffic as human beings click on those drop downs like crazy.

Link to search results instead of your website:

– From your email campaign

– From your social media profiles

– From your help section

From Brents Twitter he links to search for “social media consulting firm bald seo” … people all go to google and click on his site. Now “social media consulting firm bald seo” appears in the Google Suggest drop down when people start to type in “social media consulting firm”

Important to make sure dialogue flows, not just pushing products down their throat

Ways to make them Opt-In:

– Ask

– Force – you don’t get access to this content unless you subscribe. Content behind closed doors. The value to effort ratio swings around

– Trick – Most of the time if you show someone a registration form, they perceive the effort will be more than the value. Conversion higher if you make it a survey or something else and tag on the opt-in

Ways to capture email

– Lightbox – whole website will fade away and box comes up with name and email

– Sidebar

– After Content

– Bottom

Capture Friends of Friends

Example – Catch of the Day

Did viral program, saying like one of these, and the one with the most likes we will sell next week at clearance:

– Xbox 360

– Sony Playstation 3

– Nintendo Wii

Exposed COTD to over 3.5million people through Facebook

Can also have refer a friend / email a friend forms

– Says due to compliance laws on Australia / NZ, best not to have people entering 30 emails, they restrict it to 5 friends on a refer a friend campaign

Incentivize your staff that face customers

Like a lead generation contest, some retailers have done this well

Emails from Facebook

Facebook now enables us to put registration pages on Facebook, using tabs can have competitions or email registration forms, great way to put mechanisms in place where the eyeballs are, Facebook can pre-fill these forms out with the information you have on your account

You can just iframe a web page registration form into Facebook

Polls and Surveys

Customers love giving their opinions

Hold a competition

Works very well in Australia, Australians love free stuff, in America they are more sceptical and think what are you going to do with their info or whats the catch.

You enter the competition via registration

Offer free information

Put them behind certain walls of registration processes

Loyalty Programs

Some think the perceived effort to start a loyalty program is complex

But has worked on the big end to maintain market share. Joked that Qantas share price would be 20% of what it is now without the loyalty program.

Ask for emails at Point of Sale

Jeans West do a very good job of this, staff are trained to say when you give me your credit card give us your drivers licence so we can check your name, address and then ask for their email. Takes away some of their effort, plus now you have their age, postal address, everything.

Welcome emails

Vistaprint says – go back into our website and get 20% off. A large number of people after getting the welcome email go back into the website and buy. Encourages click throughs back to the website to buy products that you didn’t buy the first time

Says Free Shipping is the single biggest thing and online- tell them their first transaction has no shipping, often they will go straight back into your website and buy

Timing – Best times to send emails

Best time around 10-11am mark is what they are seeing across their customers

You want them to just see your email pop up

Don’t want them coming back after a break or night and seeing a whole stack of old emails with yours mixed in, will just all get deleted

Catch of the Day model is middle of the day – 12midday on the dot

They do Brands Exclusive – they want to send out 730am in the morning, now 630am, they want to be that first email of the day before that chunk of emails comes in the morning.

Remember – spam laws force you to maintain record of where they subscribed

Just down here at the Hilton Melbourne for SEO, Dejan Petrovic from Dejan SEO did a great presentation on Managing Large Link Building Campaigns.

Topic: Managing Large Link Building Campaigns

Managing large-scale link building campaigns and coordinating a team of thirty link
builders is not a simple task. Dan Petrovic from Dejan SEO introduces a link
building framework designed to streamline workflow and team efficiency. This
session will reveal an amazing amount of technical detail and theory around
link building you never considered before.

Speaker: Dejan Petrovic – SEO Strategist, Dejan SEO

Here are some of my notes from the session:

How do you compete with people that:

– spam edu forums
– buy expired domains
– have a blog network

Tools – Open Site Explorer, Majestic – scan links
If links from casinos etc may want to do clean up session, ask webmasters to remove links, change anchor text, maybe move links to different page so looks less dodgy

Multiply linkworthy assets

Research:

– Offline Content – what data/knowledge do you have that you could put onto your website that people would link to? What is laying around the office you can utilize
– Relationships – who suppliers are, customers, physical location, presence in local business community, speaking opportunities, alumni relationships with universities, how your CEO is integrated with the business world
– Data

Relevance Dampening

– the more steps you can away gets further from your subject gets less and less relevant, Dejan found about 4 steps is about as far as you want to go

Competitive Analysis

Unrealistic competitors vs Realistic competitors
If you are that small, and your competitor is amazon who is that big, you can’t compete, understand your strength and go after a different market

Links aren’t best value if they are too many steps removed and not relevant to your core industry

Come up with each one of the competitors backlinks
Remove duplicates so you have one nice clean list to give your link builders

Competitive Analysis: Likelihood assessment

Link value / Likelihood = Target score

E.g. One of your competitors has business partnership with another company, going after that link is a waste of time

Another scenario where link value small (directory) but easy to get, likelihood of getting it very high

Look at Conversion Rate CR (%) and Goal Value GV ($) and arrange your link building opportunities into a list, sort them in order of potential, can try at this calculator: dejan.com.au/potential

Also work out what phrase points to what page, you don’t want two different people in your link building team going after the same term for different pages.

Avoid at all costs – having same anchor text,

Sterile, monogonous, same anchor text across the board = big red flag pushes you into red area
When link building, give them choices of phrase variations they can use. Different phrase variations all point to same url. E.g. Instead of “Car Insurance” everywhere, use “Best Car Insurance”, “Car Insurance Quotes”, “[Brand] Car Insurance” etc

Equip your link builders with good content, so they can say to people “hey link to this”, then the likelihood of getting links is much higher, use your link builders to distribute this content

Coordinate

you don’t want two different people contacting the same person for a link, make sure people coordinate. Also if you want links in future you can re-use contacts.

Link Building Software

You can record for each link opportunity the status of your process, e.g. “asked for a link” etc. Use Tools to held keep track like Raven, Linkdex, Ontolo

Also have created a toolbar – chrome extension

Also get to know your people and their skills, maybe some go to conferences, some are occasional journalists

During Q & A: Someone asked can’t you just point evil links to your competitors to get them penalized?

Dejan says you would have to help them first in order to penalize them so it really would not be feasible and not something they see. Google wants to see a steady pattern of cheating over a prolonged period of time, they say this is starting to look spammy, we will penalize the site.

I’ll update this page and send out all the slides, links, resources and tutorials mentioned in my speech “How to Incentivise, Convert & Leverage Social Media Followers” at SMX Melbourne Social Marketer Workshop at the Hilton on the Park, Melbourne @ 1130am Wednesday 16th November.

So I can send you all the tutorials and accompanying reports and videos make sure to:

99designs is the fastest growing design marketplace in the world for crowdsourcing graphic design work such as logos, websites, wordpress themes, business cards, product packaging and all sorts of graphics. Already over 50,000 design projects have been launched around the world on 99designs.com, they are one of the hottest tech startups in Australia at the moment and have been in the news recently for raising millions of dollars in capital from some big name silicon valley investors.

Winning Website Design from 99designs

On 99designs you post a design contest specifying what you want and usually within hours dozens of designers from around the world will submit their proposals. You give feedback along the way saying what you like and what you don’t like, and the designers continue to improve and update their designs. At the end of the contest you can pick the winning design to proceed with, or if you don’t get the design you want, you get your money back.

My friend works as an analyst at a Fund Manager in Sydney and the directors decided to put him in charge of doing the new corporate web site, which had to have a professional look and feel as it displayed all of the company’s information to prospective clients. I told my friend at the beginning that using an outsourcing site like 99designs would be the best, as you get the genuinely best designers from around the world competing. Unfortunately, his managers and directors being in their 50s and 60s were pretty old school in the beginning and insisted in hiring a local design company at 10x the price! They paid several thousand dollars for a pretty simple static wordpress website as they insisted they wanted it done locally in Australia. I had a bad feeling as this local agency rocked up to meetings wearing berets and on their own agency website meet the team page they had the office dog listed as one of the board members!

What happened was the guys in Australia took months and months and even after several expensive cab trips for meetings across town my friend was left with an incomplete and crappy site design full of errors, text running of the page, graphics and text not aligned, different and odd mismatched headings everywhere and generally an all round mess. What happened was this premium agency in Australia charging several thousand dollars actually outsourced the project to some people in Asia who they had never used before and then blamed the problem on them! So much for paying 10x the price deal with a local Australian agency. Oh and did I mention that aside from not finishing the job, this agency now wanted thousands of dollars more in payment!

Another Winning Design from 99designs

I told my friend enough of this BS and to just go ahead and post the design on 99designs and since the directors were still being old school to just pay the few hundred dollars on his own credit card. Over the coming days he was blown away as his 99designs crowdsourcing contest attracted over 30 design proposals, who had done beautiful, full in detail photoshop graphic designs for all the different pages and sections of the corporate website. He ended up choosing a very experienced graphic design firm in Asia as the winning design, who he was able to call and speak at length on the phone with several times, they explained exactly what they would do and how they would implement the photoshop PSD files into a wordpress theme and website. When he showed the winning 99designs design to the company directors they were blown away and everyone agreed that the design from 99designs was miles ahead of what the local agency produced and far more professional, not to mention the super fast turnaround in days compared to months and also being less than 1/10th of the price! Even the local Australian agency when presented with the designs from the 99designs contest had to concede that the design from 99designs was way better and begged to be able to implement it themselves!

Another friend who recently quit the corporate world posted a job on 99designs for a company logo and product packaging (getting a logo designed takes under a week and from $295), she actually was inundated with hundreds of amazing designs from around the world and they kept taking her feedback on board and keep upgrading and improving their designs every step of the way.

A quick tip that applies whenever outsourcing is make sure you be as specific as possible! In your 99designs design brief you can attach sample files and I suggest you put links and show them as examples of good websites/logos to use as design inspiration.

So the lesson, if you want cheap, professional graphic design work for your website or business done quick, at a cheap cost and by people who really are the best at what they do, best bet would really be to post your graphic design job to a crowdsourcing site like 99designs.

]]>http://apeagency.com/99designs-review-experience-using-99designs-australia/feed/0VIDEO: Incentivize Social Media Followers like Cows: Lead a Horse to Water AND make it drink!http://apeagency.com/video-incentivize-social-media-followers-like-cows-lead-a-horse-to-water-and-make-it-drink/
http://apeagency.com/video-incentivize-social-media-followers-like-cows-lead-a-horse-to-water-and-make-it-drink/#respondSat, 08 Oct 2011 06:14:50 +0000http://apeagency.com/?p=5047

I was talking about how so many websites just let people land on their blog or Facebook page and, just hope they sign up, hope they follow you, and just hope they spread the word to all their friends. What kind of a business plan is that? Nothing will happen unless you make it happen.

I’m sure you’ve heard the saying “You can lead a horse to water but you can’t make it drink.” Well, cows are different! No joke, my High School here is an Agricultural High School and we have a farm – and we were taught how to make animals drink.

True story, as you can see I went to an Agricultural High School so we had calves on the farm, and you can fill the trough with milk or water but they won’t drink, they will only suckle their mum or a bottle, or a finger. So we were taught, you dip your finger in the trough, and go “here”! And they’ll come. Then you do it again and make them come closer. Then you do it again and hold it just above the trough. Then you put your finger underneath the water, and BAM, you have taught the animal how to drink!

So incentivize everything. Click LIKE on Facebook to reveal a free video. Then join our email newsletter for a free eBook. Then share on Facebook or Twitter to access this. And even, buy off our affiliate links and get all these free bonuses!

You need to pull your customers through your funnel and incentivize them to take every single action you want.

I went to the Young Entrepreneurs Unconvention on Saturday Sept 18th 2011 in Sydney which was my 2nd Unconvention and had a big turnout with around 350+ young entrepreneurs attending.

Massive props to all the speakers for taking time out to connect with and inspire young people – especially Andrew Morello who made time to speak even though he had to run to an auction straight after. Most busy business people would have done their speech and left but Morello came straight back and spent the rest of the day connecting with all the Young Entrepreneurs at the conference – respect!!

The Young Entrepreneur’s Unconventions are held a few times a year in Sydney and Melbourne so look forward to catching you guys at the next one!

Here are some key points from the speakers:

Matt Barrie – The Future of Entrepreneurship

Matt Barrie is CEO and Founder of Freelancer which is the world’s largest outsourcing platform and also the most highly trafficked website in the world that is owned by an Australian. Matt was also the BRW Entrepreneur of the Year 2011.

Matt talked about how the global labour market is disrupting, with online outsourcing offering huge opportunities for small businesses in the West to outsource tasks to the developing world often at 1/10th of the cost locally, and there is also a huge opportunity for people in developing countries to now earn their months wage in a few hours.

Matt also talked about the massive opportunity with approximately 2 billion people connected to the internet – but that means there are 5 billion people on the planet NOT already connected to the internet and many of them are connecting at rapid pace right now. And the first thing many of these people want to do (especially since they are in developing countries) is increase their economic status and earn money online!

Matt pointed out the tremendous opportunity for small businesses as so much stuff out there is FREE for businesses to use, things like Gmail, Skype, WordPress.

There are also so many services that are extremely cheap for small businesses to use, things like Amazon Web Services, PayPal, eBay, Facebook, Freelancer, Moneybookers, Shopify, PR Newswire, Kissmetrics, LinkedIn.

Matt said there is no better time to start a business and gave some examples:

Digg – was started for $60 and got an offer for $200m from Google 4 years later – Was on the cover of Business Week “How This Kid Made $60 Million in 18 Months”.

Omnisio – Initially funded $20,000 by Y Combinator, no further funding, Sold to Youtube for $15 million just 4 months later

PC Tools – free anti-virus that started with $1000 and sold to Symantec for $300m

Twitter – 200m users in 5 years

Facebook – 750m users in 7 years

Cityville – reached 100m users in 45 days

Zynga – Makes flash games on Facebook – Founded in July 2007, in 2010 made $850m revenue

Groupon – Founded Nov 2008, “made $1 billion in sales faster than any other business, ever” (according to the WSJ)

Linkedin IPO – Listed @ $45, Opened @ $83 and has stayed high and currently @ $88 – shows the public has an appetite for tech again

Matt Barrie said there should be a stampede of IPO’s coming up – such as Groupon, Zynga, Living Social, Etsy, Gilt Group, Yelp, Jive, Angie’s List, eHarmony, Etsy, Zoosk, Twitter and Facebook.

Jack Delosa – Capital Raising for High Growth Ventures

Jack Delosa is a Gen Y Investor and Entrepreneur and founder of The Entourage.

Rule #1 – Only bring on smart money, half the value investors being is non-financial – e.g. their network and experience

22% of Business Owners in Australia are aged > 60, so many are looking to sell and it is a buyers market

Typical business in Australia sells for 1.5x profit

Businesses can sell for 4-6x even 8x earnings multiple if it has been prepared for exit and worked with advisors

In a survey of 10,000 investors by Wholesale Investor Magazine, 90.5% of investors said yes, they would invest in a business in their space that was pre-revenue if there were good people at the helm

Rule #2 – Have an advisory board – meet mentors who have been there and done that, it can start with a few informal chats over coffee, if it goes well just ask if they would like to attend a few board meetings and be on your advisory board

Stuart Cook from Zambero – asked 70 of the CEOs from the BRW Fastest Growing 100 out to lunch – Guess how many said no? Zero. And the next year Zambero was the fastest growing franchise in BRW.

Tip for getting mentors and contacts – help them first. Find out what they need and give it to them for free, such as helping hand out flyers or disclaimers at their conferences or events.

Rule #3 with Capital Raising – stage it. That way you give away less of your business as if you only raise the funds you need for Year 1, then when Year 2 comes your company should have a higher valuation and you should be able to raise more capital by giving away a smaller % of your company.

Rule #4 – Understand how to value a business. No.1 biggest factor is people, No.2 is Market opportunity – how are you solving the problem? How will you make money off it?

Also understand Strategic Value – ask who can make more money from my business than I can? This way you can sell your business for a price WAY above any calculations from earnings multiples.

A great example of this is Nullsoft WinAmp which was started by a 16 year old kid from Arizona. It was freeware software and not making profits so any businesses buying it based on earnings multiples would not be offering much at all (infact a gentleman at the Unconvention talked about how he flew to Arizona and offered $50,000 for the business). But the massive database of registered WinAMP users was of great strategic value to other players and AOL bought Nullsoft Winamp for $80 million.

Andrew Morello – Unconventional Strategies for Business Development

Andrew Morello won the first season of The Apprentice Australia and is now works alongside Mark Bouris as BDM at Yellow Brick Road.

Although I don’t usually watch TV, I did watch the entire first season of The Apprentice and was a huge fan of Morello and was thrilled to see him win! I could see straight away he had amazing people skills and the ability to connect with people and I thought that was a main reason why he was chosen by Mark Bouris as the winner. It was great to see Morello in person and he certainly has a great warmth and energy about him.

Morello talked about treating all people with respect, and said have a genuine authentic conversation with people. Some tips were the FORD points:

Family
Occupation
Recreation
Dreams

e.g. Morello listens to BBC World News on 936AM Radio, that way when he meets people he knows what is happening in their culture and can have authentic conversations. He gave an example how he heard some of the latest news from Pakistan, then when he gets in a cab and the driver is from Pakistan, Morello is able to talk about the latest news that just happened, especially when you know what has happened in someone’s home country before they do and can tell them about it – it helps built a connection if you have a genuine interest about their culture.

Ruslan Kogan – Told the Kogan story

Ruslan Kogan is the founder of Kogan Technologies and has been listed on the BRW Young Rich List and also the BRW Fast 100

As long as there is demand, whether you start an auction at $0.01 does not matter it will finish at the same price. And actually starting ebay listings at $0.01 for his LCD TV’s meant they gained momentum and got around 500 watchers.

Kogan’s No 1 Business lesson – Look for win/win, otherwise it’s not sustainable for the long term

Wayne Gretsky was asked “Why are you a good hockey player?” He said “I don’t skate to where the puck is, I skate to where the puck is going” and that applies to Business.

E.g. Kodak denied the digital revolution as they had a foothold on cameras and prints, but as Digital Cameras have taken over Canon/Nikon have grabbed 95% of the market and Kogan believes Kodak will not be around in 5 years.

Search Volume for “Michael Jackson”

Kogan said “business is all about servicing demand” and played around with Google Insights – which is a fantastic tool I also recommend to entrepreneurs. Some interesting examples he showed were:

“Michael Jackson”

When would be a good time to sell Michael Jackson T-shirts?

“Air Conditioners” vs “Heaters”

You can see what time of the year would you need lots of air conditioners in stock, and you can see demand peaks at the exact opposite times to heaters:

Search Volume “Air Conditioners” vs “Heaters”

Ask what is your value-add to the consumer? Why would people buy from you? What can you do better than any other business?

Example of a successful viral PR campaign was “Kevin37” when Kevin Rudd’s government announced a $900 economic stimulus package, Kogan released a $900 TV and it got on every single news channel.

Any other Young Entrepreneurs from the Unconvention keep in touch with me on Facebook or Twitter.

Let me know what were your key takeaways?

Would love your thoughts and comments!

]]>http://apeagency.com/young-entrepreneurs-unconvention-review-matt-barrie-andrew-morello-jack-delosa-ruslan-kogan/feed/2VIDEO: James Ruse Awards Day Speech – Living Your Dreams: What I Wish I Knew in High Schoolhttp://apeagency.com/james-ruse-awards-day-speech-living-your-dreams-what-i-wish-i-knew-in-high-school/
http://apeagency.com/james-ruse-awards-day-speech-living-your-dreams-what-i-wish-i-knew-in-high-school/#commentsMon, 12 Sep 2011 00:18:59 +0000http://apeagency.com/?p=5003

I was really honoured to be the guest speaker at my High School – James Ruse Agricultural High School’s Annual Awards Day – I talked about “Living your dreams: What I wish I knew in High School”.Top 5 Audience Moments

1) Mr Flood Impersonation @ 0.33

2) Asian Parents Joke @ 8.15

3) Girls, Nerds, Convertibles and why James Ruse = Hot! @ 9.30-10.30

4) Having balls, a special volunteer and HSC Study Notes @ 11.08-12.35

5) Let’s show the world what James Ruse Students can really do! @ 13.34

To all the students, teachers and parents – thanks so much for having me! I was blown away by how nice and humble all the students and there parents are, as well as all the teachers who care so much about helping other people achieve their dreams!

James Ruse students – would love your comments guys! What are you up to and what are your goals and dreams?

And everyone else – What would your advice be to the smartest young kids wanting to achieve their dreams? What do you wish you knew in High School?

Also WOW I saw the James Ruse Rap “Green and Yellow” and videos from the final assembly, hilarious! Well done to T-izzle, A-dawg and the Prefects! That must have brought the house down! So cool how all the teachers got into it too like Mr McFadyen!

Speech Transcript

Good Morning Everyone,

Thanks so much for having me. I’m really proud to have gone to James Ruse and I’m really excited to be back here. Just wondering which of my teachers are still here? You guys know Mr Alder?
Does he still say “Your algebra’s not up to standard peoples!”?
What about Mr Flood? This is my Mr Flood impersonation [hands behind head and put feet up]!

Anyway I’d love to share with you guys what I wish I knew in High School. So I’ll start at the beginning, on my very first day at James Ruse.

Do you guys remember Maths Olympiad in Primary School? I really wanted to be cool, so I decided to stitch my giant Maths Olympiad Badge on my James Ruse backpack. My first day everyone on the train was calling me “MathsBoy” which stuck for the next 6 years.

Anyway I actually started my first internet business while here at High School. I was 15 and my parents sat me down and said, “Son, we are sending you to work at the local Burger King” where they paid $4 an hour.

Now can you imagine sending a James Ruse nerd to Burger King in Bankstown? I would have been killed! Because let’s face it, there are some people at James Ruse, if they went to a normal school, they’d get flushed!

I pleaded “No, No, wait … I’m going to start an internet business” and I even stirred my Dad up by saying “I’m going to have clients in the United States and get checks in the post!” and he was like “this is ridiculous!”

But soon piles and piles of checks would arrive in the post from the US and Europe while I was at school, (I copied the first 50 from Year 10), so I successfully avoided working at Burger King!

Then later while I was studying eMarketing and Law at Sydney Uni, I turned a hypothetical business plan assignment into reality and launched a successful eCommerce store called ApeShop. I’ve run my own online businesses ever since and by the time I graduated law school I successfully avoided working as a lawyer!

But I still did internships in Banking and Law and I always thought that if we at James Ruse are the top 1% of the state in our marks, then we would get the top 1% of the jobs, the top 1% of the wealth and opportunities. Unfortunately, if you think you can just hide in a corner with your head down, get a high ATAR and first class honours degree and strangers will roll out the red carpet of opportunity for you, I’m sorry to burst your bubble but the world we live in does not work like that.

That realization did not hit me until I was looking to hire someone for my own business. So put yourself in my shoes. Imagine you are looking to hire someone to work closely with you, to share sensitive information with so you really have to trust them.

Who are you going to hire? A) A person that you know and trust, you have seen first hand somewhere at school, university, or through friends that they are brilliant … or B) A random stranger, who you have never met or heard of, none of your colleagues have ever heard of, but, they have a high UAI or ATAR. And that was the moment it all hit me.

Times are changing, in the past many companies had to interview strangers and use marks because they couldn’t find someone they already know and trust. But the world we live in is becoming much more connected then ever before and with Social Media our networks are far more accessible. A company can see straight away say on LinkedIn that a whole stack of its employees in the years above you in school or uni, rave about how amazing you are. Those recommendations are so much more powerful as the hard working qualities you guys have can’t truly be communicated on a piece of paper alone.

Now imagine you are in Year 12 and applying for university and jobs, but all your friends are in the same stage of life as you, it’s like the blind leading the blind! I realized all this when I got into salsa dancing as I met so many diverse friends – people younger than me, older than me, some were at uni, some were doctors. A good friend I met at Salsa did Law like me, but he was 10 years ahead and really high up in a law firm, and he just dropped into the conversation how he was busy looking at all the applications from Uni Students for Summer Internships! He said the “yes” interview pile is so full they reject everything unless it absolutely stands out and that student is highly recommended by somebody. So I wish I had friends to tell me things like that!

So a real secret to success in life is to make genuine friends with people that are also passionate about going where you want to go and people who are a few steps ahead of you in life and who are where you want to be, that have already been there and done that and can help you.

There is virtually no problem you can have that other people haven’t already been through, whether it’s with school, your parents or whatever.

So you guys need to make a real effort to do whatever it takes to connect with people outside your normal social circle, that is another reason why getting involved in extra-curricular activities is so powerful. And the best way to attract those people to you is to be nice and giving to everyone.

At James Ruse we are so lucky to have teachers here that actually care, fellow students that encourage you, and parents that support you. At University and in the corporate world, most people aren’t looking out for you. It’s very rare and special to be able to surround yourself with people that are genuinely supporting you to achieve your dreams – I travel the world and take 23hr flights just to connect with those types of people for a few days. And looking back at School and University I have to say – you will never have an environment where the people around you care as much about you, your dreams and your future as this place you are sitting in right now.

Another thing is to embrace and be proud of who you are and where you are from. Most of us from James Ruse, we are from a humble background. So like you guys I’m not from a rich powerful family that automatically brings privileges and opportunities. But earning it and making it happen yourself is a massive gift of empowerment. I didn’t really realize this until I went to my first conference in New York City. I had to travel to the opposite side of the world, where I knew nobody and make it all happen on my own initiative.

If everything is easy and handed to you on a platter – you end up with a false sense of self-entitlement. Some rich kids may get one job or opportunity because they have family connections, so they may have been given one fish, but we’ve learned how to fish, that lasts a lifetime. I have so much respect for you guys, who have earned your place into James Ruse through sheer hard work. And if you apply this same attitude to any area of life you will conquer it. If you can survive James Ruse, the HSC and Asian Parents – you can do anything!

I say think Big and aim to hit it out of the Park. Setting goals and dreams outside your comfort zone – that’s where life is lived.

I know the HSC is stressful, but focus on the positive upside and tremendous opportunity. Don’t worry – no matter how badly you screw up, it will never be too late to turn it around. Many students in my law classes missed the cut-off for law, so they just did Arts the first year, aced it at uni, and transferred in 2nd year – and because they had such a good attitude they were the top students. But you are going to have to put in the hard work at some stage, and there’s no better time than now.

So be positive and focus on the things you do have. Life is not a 100% sum game, no matter how brilliant you are, not everybody will appreciate you, you just need to focus on the people that do. Stressing about what you don’t have isn’t constructive, but being excited about what you do have is. As hard working young people, you should all be really excited as your future is going to get better and better the older you get. Especially the guys in the house – like when I got Dux of Primary School girls would say “NERD!” but things change! Like the other week, I was driving down Bondi Beach in my convertible, and these girls just jumped into my car! And then when I told the girls what High School I went to, they said, “You went to James Ruse?! That is SO HOT!”

Also you guys are really hard working but make sure you apply that to the goals you are truly passionate about. There is a great quote from Anthony Robbins. He says: “Choose, don’t react. Don’t take what’s given to you by the environment that you walk by each day. Decide precisely what you want, decide what it will take to make that happen, and make that happen.”
Think what were your favourite moments growing up? What subjects, what activities, and what things did you love the most? What excited you? And that’s what you should study and continue doing!

I’ve been really lucky to travel the world and meet lots of inspiring people and I often think, what is it that sets these people apart and makes them so successful? It’s not that they all got a 100 UAI … the common factor is these people have balls, they put themselves out there, and go for it.

So, speaking of having guts, I would like to one student to volunteer to come up here and join me on stage! Preferably someone studying or who wants to study Chemistry and Economics, but anyone who is the first to come up!

These are all my notes from the HSC. I typed up everything for every point of the syllabus, even drew all the diagrams, there’s 100s of pages per subject, tonnes of practice essays … [To Esther who came up] – it’s yours to keep, I hope it helps, best of luck!

The people who really go places, are not so much those who are just technically talented, but those who can connect with and inspire other people; they share their knowledge and talents freely and improve the lives of the people around them. I am not saying for a moment that your marks are not important because they absolutely are. What I am saying is you need both.

So thank you so much for having me. Please keep in touch – My blog is FatCowBusiness.com, and I’ll put some notes and the video from this speech at FatCowBusiness.com/Ruse. I’d love to hear your comments and your goals and dreams.

And to all the teachers and everyone at this school – thank you so much for everything. It was my dream to come to this school, and it was also always my dream to come back and speak. I hope you guys take on board what I’ve said and put yourselves out there and go for it – let’s live our dreams and let’s show the world just how much James Ruse students really can do.

So here are some top tips from Justin’s roundtable for getting more Facebook Likes:

1- It’s all about ENGAGEMENT

90% of people don’t come back to your page, they just see status updates in their news feed
Very easy for people to unsubscribe / hide so they no longer see your updates
In Analytics – see your unsubscribe / hide rate
Fluff updates – makes you more a person
Facebook comments do get more weight than likes
Best tactic to get likes and comments – ask for it! E.g. Tell me your thoughts, we want to hear from you
AllFacebook did a study, simply ASKING for comments increased response significantly.
E.g. L’il Wayne broke Oreo’s Guiness World Record for the most Facebook Likes in 24hrs, all L’il Wayne did was ASK people to click Like

2- Don’t post too often

Even people who love you, if you post content way too often, they will unsubscribe / hide you.

Paper for university – found posting too often was the No.1 reason for people unliking you as friends (and these are friends) – can you imagine how easy it is to hide a company page?

Safe number: Once a day, if you are going to post multiple times a day, spread them out several hours.

3- Use Fan Gates, Call to Action

Big Problem – Not having a landing tab, clear call to action
Fan Gating your content completely is a very good practice, have lots of different ones.
Anything you do that’s not fan gated is a waste of your time.

Make the Fan Gate Page the Default Landing Tab for new visitors by going to:

Edit Page > Manage Permissions > Set Default Tab – if you don’t do this you have wasted your time, as they will hit your page and go to the wall and not see or care about any of the reveal tabs

4- Don’t sell

Facebook and Twitter are lead gen tools.
Social Media not for selling, it is for lead gen at best.
A LIKE is a microconversion – very tip top of a funnel.
Very delicate, easy for them to drop out.

Tips for Facebook Ads:

70% of the most important part of your ad is the picture – one effective ad was an image with a baby crying – “Don’t cry over bad Fan Pages”
Facebook CTR is completely different to Google. Anywhere between 0.04 and 0.1 is ok, 0.1 is pretty good.

1 pixel surrounding of a bright colour – that contrast with Facebook colours
Use colours that contrast with Facebook to stand out as much as you can, separate yourself from all the noise.

Can make it work with $5-$10 a day
Sponsored Stories – a little more expensive than regular ads but their conversion much better as social proof

Other tips:

Add Facebook Like box to your website / blog

Like this button on all your products

Make sure Facebook Profile Image takes up all the real estate

People on Facebook want to stay on Facebook

If you notice someone on your page who is posting a lot – give them something. They are your brand evangelists and you need to reward them, if only by saying thank you.

Facebook is not something you can outsource, need someone who understands your company and your page.

So we thought we would give you guys some top tips from Steph and Joe’s #ase11 panel for using Social Media Marketing in Niche Markets to generate followers, traffic and sales.

Steph made a great point to start, that:

1- Social Media is not straight up marketing as in selling and pitching – do things that are more interactive and engaging

Joe added, the biggest thing in Social Media is – don’t be a tool, you are having real conversations with real people, answer their questions, pay attention to what people are saying about you

2- Be consistent

Steph – you don’t want to bombard people, recommend once a day on Facebook Mon-Fri, whereas Twitter is a different platform. On Twitter it’s OK to post much more frequently and have lots of conversations with people

Joe – On Facebook do 1, 2 maybe 3 posts a day
Whereas on Twitter – may get 20 or 30 tweets a day going

3- Tailor to twitter and Facebook

Steph – Don’t link your Facebook and Twitter together, because e.g. on Facebook if you want to link to another fan page to get more exposure, you have to like that fan page, whereas in twitter you can say @affiliatesummit without having to follow them.
Facebook is also different to Twitter with more space, images. Steph says post around once a day when it comes to a Fan Page, people are easily turned off and can unlike your page when they see you several times in their news feed and they want to see more personal things

4- Ask social questions

Steph – gave the example of Dominos, they posted on Facebook – click LIKE if you are happy if your kids are going back to school – got thousands of likes and comments, it gets them pushed up peoples news feeds so future updates by Domino’s appears in news feeds more

Joe – Ask questions – who is going to the game this weekend? Who is your fav player? Gets people talking which will push up the edgerank too

5- Have conversations with influencers and mention other Fanpages in your updates

Steph- Worth taking the extra minute or two to find the Fanpage, link to it, then you get the extra exposure to yourself, if you mention a page with 2 million likes you appear on their wall (Note by Dave, so when posting on your own Facebook Page, you can go and like another page like say Dominos, then when typing your status update if you type @Dominos it will actually link to that other Fan Page and can appear on their wall as a mention too)

Joe – the more you can interact with these people that are the most vocal in your niche, the better

Steph – Got involved with the Affiliate Summit niche, so would write blog posts featuring top sessions in Affiliate Summit, or write things about people in the industry, these are top picks, include people you are recommending – you are giving other people props, that is a great way to make connections with other people. That will give you potential opportunities to connect with them.

Joe – when you get a response back from celebrities with large followers, you get a bump in your followers because all their followers see you

A great tool they mentioned to find influential people on Twitter is WeFollow.com – this lists top influencers in each category like you can view the top people tagged in “internetmarketing”, “photography”, “wine”, “tech”, “football” and many more.

Another tool they mentioned to automatically register your username on 550+ social media networks – Knowem.com

Other bonus tips from the session:

Steph – Do a themed follow Friday

Joe – Not a fan of auto posting, can screw up esp if you upload a datafeed with 1000 pages then have it auto posted on twitter

Steph – says auto-DMs are a big no-no, looks spammy (Note by Dave, I agree that auto DM’s have got a bad rap as so many people do it in a spammy way and people are now sick of being flooded with those DMs like “Download my free ebook by signing up to my site”. However I think the intention people have with those auto DM’s to build an email list outside of Twitter is a good idea. Best to go about it in non spammy way, like “Hi I’m Chloe, I blog and make videos reviewing shoes and clothes at …”

Joe – recommends not following everyone who follows you, as a good percentage are bots and fake accounts just to spam people.

Someone in the audience also asked a question during the session – any tools that are good at sniffing out the bots and unfollowing? I personally use and recommend Tweet Adder

Steph – Posting videos works well and gets great engagement – video is still pretty untapped

Joe – Content curation is great

Steph – On Facebook you can have one umbrella page and add tabs with specific niches
But on twitter best to have specific different accounts for each niche

Writing guest posts for other blogs is a great way to get traffic and exposure. Find authoritative sites in your market, and provide quality content and get links and traffic.

This list is aimed towards Internet Marketing / Making Money Online bloggers, but to find the top blogs in any niche like Forex, Dating, Health, You can also see the Top Blogs in your category in the Technorati Top 100 and for your topic in the Invesp Blog Rank Directory.

MyBlogGuest is also a great free resource to find Guest Bloggers and websites seeking Guest Posts.

Here is a list of the Top 20+ Internet Marketing Blogs seeking guest posts (with high PR and Alexa Rank) for you guys:

Social Media Examinerhttp://www.socialmediaexaminer.com/writers/
PR 5, Alexa 2223
51,551 Facebook Likes
Tough – they do say you need to be an established authority and have a track record of writing detailed articles.

If you want your customers to join your email newsletter, like your page on Facebook or share on Social Media, you MUST give them an incentive and the best way is to give them a free eBook or video or digital content.

To get an eBook or video to give away (or even to sell as your own product), just buy a Private Label Rights PLR eBook or report and you can even make yourself the author and slap on your own cover and brand. (There are many people on Fiverr.com Graphics section who can make you a custom eBook cover graphic for just $5!)

You can also buy PLR articles for site content, PLR graphics for your site like headers, PLR Templates, PLR Videos, PLR Audio and even PLR blogs all set up and ready to go!

My Top 7 Best Sources for PLR and MRR products are:

Warrior Forum WSO Warrior Special Offers section – Tonnes of PLR stuff here, just search PLR in the Warrior Special Offers Section. Usually special deals for warriors and often PLR products sold will be limited to 20 sales or 50 sales allowed ever meaning only a handful of people get the product. And 95% of people who buy PLR products never bother republishing them anyway so you will have almost unique content and be one of just a handful of people online with the rights to those products.Master Resale Rights – has a large selection of PLR and MRR eBooks and videos. I have found some really good quality products here for extremely cheap prices like only several dollars.The PLR Store – many categories of PLR/MRR products in a wide variety of nichesEasy PLR – Excellent quality, professionally written articles and reports that pass through 2 writers scrutiny. You can just choose the content you need without having to pay for memberships. Even better many of the PLR article packs are sold to a strictly limited number of people only, and you can see e.g. 2 out of 100 remainingPLR eBook Club – one of the biggest and best PLR sites with thousands of articles for over 400 niches and new content constantly added, highly recommended by many on the Warrior ForumPLR Sifu – Smaller source but worth a look7PLR – Worth a look, purchase individual PLR ebooks and videos

If that isn’t enough, Michael on the Warrior Forum made a great blog post listing 208+ PLR Membership sites so you can browse that exhaustive list!

Cloudflood is completely free and really cool, instantly create a free share button to put on your site, and the customer has to click that and share on Facebook or Twitter in order to unlock some free content.

Punchtab also uses Facebook Connect and users can earn loyalty points for free content or competitions for every action they take on your site, like clicking like, sharing, commenting. It comes as a WordPress Plugin and is easy to install, the free version is also great and comes with many prizes automatically built in like gift vouchers for major online stores once your users earn enough points by commenting / sharing content on your site.

List Eruption is another one that I actually use on my blogs. This doesn’t require Facebook Connect, once people sign up to your email list, I give them a custom link and say, share this to all your friends on Facebook or Twitter or anywhere. If 3 of your friends sign up your can access these free ebooks, and if 5, 10 sign up you get to access all these freebies at every step! This is worth checking out as sometimes people are reluctant to allow a Facebook or Twitter application to access their account, with List Eruption they just share their custom URL themselves via any means they want to all their friends.

Viral Easy Profit, also known as Social Easy Share, lets you hide selected content on the page which is unlocked by sharing on Facebook, Twitter or even Google+. This has much more advanced features than cloudflood as it adds extra buttons to your wordpress admin, and while writing a blog post you can highlight certain content in your article and just click a button to replace it with any “Share to Unlock” button that you have set up. Viral Easy Profit also allows you to capture emails and build your list directly from Facebook. Your user doesn’t have to enter their name or email, they just click to authorise an app via Facebook Connect, and it will grab their Name, Email and all of their details without them having to type it all in! Plus they are the real working primary Facebook email addresses that people actually use and check!

You can use these content revealers and incentivize sharing using:

Articles – Such as Top 10 lists- Give them Tips 1-5, then to see tips 6-10 they have to share!
Discount Coupons – Click LIKE to reveal the discount coupon code
Videos – even better you can give create a series, part 1, part 2 is free but for part 3 have to share
Any type of Media files – Photoshop graphics pack, pdf files, zip files, software downloads
Also competitions or even an ongoing loyalty program …

]]>http://apeagency.com/how-to-incentivize-sharing-on-social-media-facebook-and-twitter-cloudflood-punchtab-list-eruption/feed/0How to get more twitter followers from competitors by mass following and unfollowinghttp://apeagency.com/how-to-get-more-twitter-followers-from-competitors-by-mass-following-and-unfollowing/
http://apeagency.com/how-to-get-more-twitter-followers-from-competitors-by-mass-following-and-unfollowing/#respondFri, 19 Aug 2011 00:24:50 +0000http://apeagency.com/?p=4889

I’ve been using some twitter tools (best one is Tweet Adder) which allow you to automatically follow all the followers of another user, or users with keywords in their profile or tweets. If your account and tweets are relevant, a large chunk will follow you back. And those that don’t you can automatically unfollow to keep within Twitter’s ratios. As once you follow 2000 people, you can only follow 10% more than however many followers you have.

Now just be warned, if you follow or unfollow thousands of users at once, you can get accounts blocked. So the best practice is:

Don’t click mass follow thousands at once, just queue the software gradually over time to follow under 200-300 people a day, under 100 unfollows a day and wait 3 days before unfollowing. Those are the defaults of Tweet Adder and are pretty safe.

Say you had a Diabetes website, almost every state in America has diabetes associations and you could follow all their twitter followers.

This needs to be very tightly targeted in order to work, following Justin Bieber’s followers won’t work, much better to follow users from a smaller list or association that tightly matches your target market, and use this sensibly in conjunction with valuable tweeting. The more useful tweets you send out, the more tweets with popular hashtags, the more twitter lists you get on and definitely the more retweets and mentions you have the more followers you get.

Nadia Aly, Community Manager, Microsoft at Social Media Marketing Las Vegas 2011 in her presentation said she has had accounts blocked when following 400 people a day, but just wrote to Twitter and had them restored.

Also at Social Media Marketing Las Vegas 2011, Pierre Zarokian from SubmitExpress did a talk “Twitter Tools & Automation” and said using TweetSpinner he followed 12,000 of Matt Cutts followers, only 12% followed back.

I have heard many people have also found that on keyword following you get more people following you back then when you try and just follow other peoples followers.

Tweet Adder can give you a useful boost at the start, once you have a few thousand followers people often retweet and recommend you and you can go viral.

Make sure you join our newsletter for our free ebook and videos on Making Money with Social Media!

What are your experiences guys? Would love your comments how many followers and unfollowings you have been able to accomplish with tools like Tweet Adder, and any tips you can share with the rest of us!

It was absolutely awesome – the crowd was so many keen and open minded affiliates and entrepreneurs and they were great! I LOVED IT and we were out until late at night with everyone!

Susan Bratton came to Australia and did a great keynote on persuasion marketing – she actually recorded her whole presentation at conversiontriggers.com. So here are 5 Tips for Email Marketing Sales Conversions for Affiliates from Susan Bratton’s Keynote:

She talked about the Rule of Reciprocity – that when you give value first, like free ebook or free tips, customers feel more compelled to do something back – huge as some other affiliates concerned that you can’t sell on social media or Facebook – but I say, give value first and create desire.

Susan loves getting their email, she said give them 3 pieces of content / value then go for the close

Features and Benefits don’t really sell products, what sells is stories, tell how it solves someone elses problem. She talked about how powerful story telling is, and overcoming objections, and had a great quote by David Garfinkel “Join in the conversation a person is having with himself”

Run their emotions from the worst/horrible scenario without your product – like crying/unhappy baby to the best/wonderful scenario – good behaved baby, lost weight etc and back so they feel the pain and contrast.

Using tools like Google Website Optimizer for split testing, she said you need between 500-1500 clicks before they can tell the difference between 5-8 headlines in a statistically significant way, usually between $50-$150 to test, she said she tests 7 landing pages for her product about rekindling the intimacy in a relationship. Some quick tips were captions under pictures convert more, and orange buttons work best.

Moderator Matt Bateman from Viva9 similarly talked about some great campaigns, a quick tip he mentioned too was that ORANGE and GREEN signup buttons work best.

Myself and David Iwanow from The Lost Agency recapped some interesting points and gave our thoughts from the Group Buying Panel Discussion about Australian Group Buying sites, Daily Deals and shopping clubs after the Affili@Syd Australia Affiliate Marketing Conference 2011.

Sam Yip from Telsyte Research gave some figures on the size of the Group Buying Market in Australia:

– The market has grown $150m since last year

– 4000 deals / month = $1m vouchers sold

– Pricing high atm with average prices of $75-$80

– Market value for Group Buying in Australia forecast at > $400m, and if you add the daily deals sites too then > $600m

– Deals are very conducive to viral marketing, so simply and easy to share

– Very simple purchase decision, usually yes or no

Simon Robinson from Ouffer.com said restaurants were quick to take it up, but the difficulty has been bigger brands, worried about brand equity. Sam from Telsyte said 75% of the market is health/beauty and food/dining.

Moderator Chris Barron from Viva9 challenged the panel saying only 19.9% of deal buyers are returning to restaurants, but Jeremy from Deals.com.au said there was a 30-40% return rate at minimum. Another point raised was that businesses should squeeze more value out by getting the customer to fill out a survey so you get their details.

Other some positive figures for group buying:

– 48% plan to run another promotion

– 36% spend more than the vouchers value

Simon from Ouffer.com said they get significant traffic from group buying aggregator sites, enough volume to take notice and offer revenue sharing with affiliates

Most panellists agreed the future direction of group buying websites would see:

– More group buying targeted for niches, per interests, this is something Groupon is investing in

G’day Mates! This is Dave here coming to you LIVE from Sydney – I’m really excited to be coming soon to the world’s biggest Affiliate Marketing Conference, Affiliate Summit in New York City! So a big G’day to all my Affiliate peeps around the world!

I’ll be speaking on Sunday at 2pm about Making Money with Facebook, Twitter & Blogging. I’ve got some really fascinating case studies, plus you’ll be able to win this Authentic Boomerang and Didgeridoo from Australia! I’m still deciding on the last prize – we’ve got a Poll going, so help me out and vote – should I give away a Koala, Kangaroo, Platypus or Wombat?

There are tonnes of awesome sessions I’m really looking forward to as well, like Wil Reynold’s Keynote, he was fantastic last time in Vegas, and Marc Ostrofsky’s keynote, this guy was recently on The View with Barbara Walters & Whoopi Goldberg, so that’s the type of go-getters the summit is filled with.

When I came last year to Affiliate Summit I was blown away, so many people are genuinely about achieving their dreams and helping others. Scott from unmarketing.com summed it up in his speech last time, he said “get to know the person first, then what they do”.
I’ve travelled to conferences all over ever since, and I have to say, if you want to connect with people that care and get that … Affiliate Summit is the best conference in the world!

So check out AffiliateSummit.com – and I can’t wait to see you guys at all the parties and sessions at the Hilton New York City, August 21st – 23rd!

P.S. I’m staying another week and would love to film lots of videos around New York City, let me know if any of you guys are keen to meetup

Hey guys! I’m really excited to be speaking at Affiliate Summit 2011 in New York City, I’ll be giving away a Boomerang and Didgeridoo … I’m still deciding on the last prize though, I want to bring an animal from Australia so I need your help, please vote which Australian animal I should give away:

A) Koala – You guys probably think from watching Oprah that Koala’s are all cute and cuddly, but they actually have some serious claws to dig into all those trees they climb.

B) Kangaroo – The Kangaroo and Emu are the two animals on the Australian Coat of Arms. You know why? Because they can only go forward, they can’t go backwards.

C) Platypus – They look like a beaver but with a duck’s bill. I was originally thinking to call my blog BusinessBeaver, as for such a little animal it gets a lot of searches! Maybe there’s something I don’t know about there …

D) Wombat – these are cool little animals that burrow and dig holes.

Anyway, I want to give away one of these animals, so make sure you vote – Koala, Kangaroo, Platypus or Wombat, and I’ll see you guys in New York City!

The AffiliatSyd conference this year was absolutely awesome – the crowd was so many keen and open minded affiliates and entrepreneurs and they were great! I LOVED IT and we were out until late at night with everyone!

In this video my good friend David Iwanow from The Lost Agency and I bring you some tips from AffiliatSyd 2011 and the Power Affiliate Panel, filmed live from Sydney Harbour!

Tips from the Affili@Syd Power Affiliate Panel

One of my favourite parts was the power affiliate panel with some really smart affiliates Fred Schebesta, James Kitchener and Susan Bratton debated topics like Email vs Social Media & Facebook for Affiliates, and also changes in Search vs Social Media Marketing.

Matt Bateman asked an interesting question to the panel – is email marketing going to become devalued?

Susan Bratton from Conversion Triggers was a huge fan of email giving visitors free content and getting their email

James Kitchener from OnlineMediaJunkies was a huge fan of email and gave a few tips from his experience:

– The scope of what email was used for has decreased. E.g. emailing holiday pics, that is something that we may have used to email but that’s gone and been lost to Facebook

– Email is getting more noise and competition

The panel also discussed Search vs Social Media Marketing and problems with Affiliates getting Google slapped:

Moderator Matt Bateman from Viva9 – thought search engines will become less important, and people will be making decisions more based on buying recommendations from their network

Susan had some stories about being Google Slapped – so did people in the audience, angry at accounts getting slapped or banned by Google without warning

James also said with the SEM industry, it’s hard to have a data capture page and keep Google happy, and that Search Engine Marketing especially for Affiliates is going to get harder and harder.

I actually also remember Frederick Vallaeys the Adwords guy at Google did a session at Affiliate Summit New York 2010 about the Google slap and said “the days of easy money in affiliate marketing by search marketing are over” – which was scary to hear!

So Facebook and Social Media Marketing is a great opportunity, especially for affiliates.

Hey guys! This is Dave here coming to you from London, I was just over here speaking at A4uExpo Europe, I’m actually giving up the European summer and this great London weather (not … been trying to film this for days but it keeps raining!) and flying back home to Sydney because I’m really excited to be speaking at Affiliatsyd, Australia’s largest Affiliate Marketing Conference at the Menzies Hotel in Sydney on Wed 22nd June!

My session is called ‘Follow Me: Tips & Tools to skyrocket followers using Facebook, Twitter and Blogging’ at 1030am. I’ll show you guys tonnes of tools to spy on your competitors and automate your social media efforts, as well as lots of fascinating case studies from travelling the world, like which Facebook Ads get the most clicks and which incentives work best to get more sign ups to your website. Plus I’m bringing some prizes back from Europe which you can win during my session!

There are some other great sessions as well, Susan Bratton is coming to Australia to do the keynote on “Persuasion Strategies for Affiliate Marketers”. There are lots of case studies on great campaigns which I am looking forward to, like Styletread.com.au – as lots of my friends are in the fashion industry. I’m also looking forward to the Power Affiliate Panel with Susan and lots of really smart marketers there like Fred Schebesta, James Kitchener and Gayle Dallaston – so really looking forward to hearing what they have to say about Affiliate Marketing.

If you haven’t got your tickets, check out Affiliatsyd.com – they were having a giveaway on Twitter too if you act really quick! So I’ll see you guys at AffiliatSyd on Wed 22 June, and I’ll make sure to update you guys with all my notes on my blog, FatCowBusiness.com!

Ahoj! Dave here, I just finished speaking at A4uExpo Europe in Munich & got the train here to Prague.

Was filming this video on Making Money with Clickbank Tips from the A4uExpo presentation on the famous Charles Bridge in Prague and OMG from 1.35min-2.35min these guys with RUDE TSHIRTS started sneaking up behind me, waving and coming close up and flashing all the rude slogans on their t-shirts and cracking up! I had no idea at the time what was going on until I checked the video back at the hotel!

Anyway so one presentation I really enjoyed at the A4uExpo was “How to Harness the Opportunity Around Digital Information Products” by Neil Hartley from Clickbank.com

Clickbank is basically a marketplace for selling digital products like ebooks and videos online, and total sales were half a billion dollars this year. What I love about it, is the offers you promote are not by big companies, but it’s a network of entrepreneurs, who are really keen to work together and commissions for selling ebooks and videos are as high as 75%. So I’ll give you guys my 5 Top Tips from the presentation on How to Make Money with Clickbank:

1. Non-English Clickbank products

Huge opportunity for Portuguese and Italian

1st Huge Opportunity is that 3 of the Top 5 Clickbank Products daily are not in English, usually 2 Spanish and 1 French.
One success story was Kristof Linder, who just took 10-15 good selling English products, and translated them into German, and clickbank is releasing an automatic Vendor Joint Venture system which splits and shares the revenue with the original vendor of the English language product.
And clickbank is launching soon in Brazil, Portugal and Italy so creating, translating and marketing Clickbank products in languages like Portugese and Italian is a HUGE opportunity.

2. “How to” products sell very sell

Clickbank sales are impulse driven by basic human needs

2nd tip is many clickbank sales are impulse driven by basic human needs. So “How to” products, like “How to lose weight” or “How to get your partner back” sell very well. Some examples given of the top selling Clickbank Products were “The Truth About 6 Pack Abs”, “How to screencast like a pro” and “Seduce with Style” about fashion and dating.One of the latest Clickbank Product success stories was Mobile Monopoly by Adam Horwitz about How to do Affiliate Marketing through mobile. All of a sudden Adam appeared on the top vendors list with $500,000 sales on day one, so Clickbank called him in for a visit, he was an 18 year old kid, and he brought this older man with him to the meeting, who Clickbank said they thought was his business advisor until he called him Dad! So anyone can do it …

3. Focus on specific Micro Niche Markets

The 3rd Tip is there’s a great opportunity to focus on really specific Micro Niche Markets. Everybody knows something about some subject. One example of a microniche Clickbank product they gave was “How to attract hummingbirds to your garden” – now how many copies do you think that sells per year? No jokes, 220,000 copies a year!

4. Joint Ventures and Partnerships

Partner with influencers in your niche to promote

4th Tip is to use Joint Ventures and Partnerships. If you just make an ebook or video and just dump it on clickbank, often affiliates won’t pick it up. More often success happens by partnerships – which is something I always talk about – find the influencers in your market and partner with them to promote and recommend your product to their followers.

5. PitchPlus One Click Upsells work very well

Conversion rates on upsells between 35-50%

And the last 5th Tip was upsells work very well – Clickbank has a one click upsell feature called PitchPlus where you can offer customers a one click upsell option to buy related products. Clickbank said the conversion rate on an upsell can be between 35-50%, and the average selling price of an upsell is actually more than for original products.

Check out this interview LIVE from A4Expo, Europe’s largest Affiliate Marketing Conference in Munich, Germany. I interviewed #a4uExpo Speaker Axel Jack Metayer from KFZ.net who did a great presentation on Google Adsense and in this quick 1 minute video he shares 3 Tips for Making More Money with Google Adsense that you can implement right away!

We just uploaded this at Starbucks at Munich Central Train station & I am now on board a train to Prague! Thanks to everyone at A4uExpo for an awesome time!

I’ll update this page and send out all the slides, links, resources and tutorials mentioned in my speech about “Facebook, Twitter & Blogging: Secrets for More Followers, Traffic & $$$” at A4uExpo Europe 2011 at the Hilton on the Park on Wed 8th June 2011 930am.

Make sure to like us on Facebook, follow us on Twitter, and join our email newsletter to get all my notes and resources from A4uExpo and leading conferences around the world.

Say you create a Facebook ad about weight loss, Facebook asks you what age, gender, likes you want to target:

Go to QuantCast.com and enter your keyword “weight loss” or a competitor’s site like “weightwatchers.com” and it shows you – visitors are Female, 35-50+, higher income, it even tells you their likes – e.g. Jillian Michaels, Oprah Magazine,

Plug this into your Facebook ads, you’ll get better targeting and higher click through rates.

Aquabumps on Facebook is an amazing example of how to give value first in Social Media.

Started by a surfer in Australia who posted photographs of Bondi Beach every single morning …

Image: aquabumps.com

Started out emailing to a few mates to cheer them up while they’re at the office, next thing 40,000 people sign up to get emailed the daily photos …

Image: aquabumps.com

Their Facebook page quickly went to 20,000 fans as well, and every morning hundreds of people like and comment on the free morning photos – brilliant!! Gorgeous!! That’s a beautiful photo!!

Now at first I was thinking, all these free photos are great, but how does this guy make money?

But when you look closer in the comments, people ask every time “How much to buy this pic?” … “Do you sell copies of this? How much would it be?” and often OTHER customers reply “you can buy the framed prints at” … and paste the link!
This happens over and over, and people now travel from around the world to visit the busy full time gallery on Bondi Beach with several staff.

And while people buy massive prints online for their living rooms for thousands of dollars, Aquabumps founder Eugene Tan spends most of his time travelling the world surfing, taking more photos, and living his dream …

So give value first, build up desire, credibility and trust, and the money will come to you …

The real opportunity with Social Media now is submitting content to sites full of influencers like Quora.com as you don’t just get the people reading it, they post it to their followers.

And that’s the real goldmine now with Social Media – with Facebook, Twitter and Blogging – it is so easy for anybody to publish and share content – this photo is from President Obama’s inauguration, look at the sea of digital cameras, this shows the powerful change which is happening – your audience now has an audience!

So if you can find the influencers, partner with them and offer good content there is potential for exponential reach!

A good app for Syndicating your Blog Posts automatically to Facebook is NetworkedBlogs – it publishes your blog posts to your Facebook Page, posts full link with preview image or makes a screenshot if there’s no image in the post.

Basically you start by going to the NetworkedBlogs app and click on “Register a Blog”, and after you fill out your Blog and Feed you click “Syndication” and you can select which Facebook Pages, Profiles or even Twitter accounts to publish the posts to.

I would also go to your Facebook Page Settings under Apps and add the Networkedblogs Tab to your page, so users can browse your blog posts directly from Facebook.

Another reason to use WordPress is it SO EASY to hook up to any of these social networks as any WordPress blog automatically has an RSS feed, just put that into Twitterfeed.

Twitterfeed publishes new posts to Twitter and Facebook as well, its so simple to set up, you can specify how often to post, how many posts to make, can connect to bit.ly and link shorteners and they have improved it lately too it will even post full proper Facebook Links with the image preview.

A really powerful tool for Automatically Syndicating your Content to Other Websites is Zemanta.

Zemanta automatically matches content to bloggers as they are writing posts about the same topic and encourages them to use and share your content.

Basically Zemanta is a FireFox Add-on, and when people write WordPress posts Zemanta appears on the side and suggests youtube videos or articles or pictures or other content to include in the post, you can just drag and drop and embed content. It’s a great idea as a user for content ideas when you’re blogging as you can quickly get relevant pictures or videos to use in an article. And YOUR content can be recommended to other sites when it matches up.

Question and Answer sites are great for content ideas, and for getting links and free traffic to your website too.

Yahoo Answers is a great source of free traffic for affiliates. Post your answer with your link, the person asking the question will almost always check it out, and so will all the other people who search for the same thing and end up finding this yahoo answers page.

This person is asking “what is a good ad network for a blogger”, people ask all the time, “how do I lose weight”, “how do I train my dog” – you can easily post a link to your blog article or even just an affiliate link like a clickbank product that helps them! Just tailor the response to the question so not deleted as spam.

LinkedIn Answers is another one – people are asking for suggestions on the best printer, best scanner, where to get business cards.

An even better one is Quora.com – This is like a social media version of Yahoo Answers for the influencers. You sign in using your Facebook or Twitter account, and many visitors are influencers who will link, retweet and share. You can get excellent direct traffic to your blog, people ask for the best resources and you can list your blog posts, or just answer their question and put a link to one of your articles for more information, you can easily get hundreds of clicks per question answered, as well as easily being shared on Facebook or retweeted.

With blogging and social media don’t create content blindly, but give the people what they want, you can see the questions being asked out there – look here on Quora, I just type in a few keywords and look at all these questions! These are the things you should be blogging about; these are the questions people out there are demanding blog posts and videos about!

Top 10 Question and Answer sites to get free website traffic for affiliates:

Type in any topic, or someone’s blog, and it will automatically show you their good, better and best posts so you can find your competitors most popular pages and content.

Postrank gives posts a score, plus you can see how many comments, retweets, how many Facebook likes. See Mari Smith did a blog post on how to contact Facebook – got hundreds of comments and retweets right away – this is obviously a topic that people are interested in.

Look at the topics and types of articles that get shared and discussed the most – the ones people are all commenting on, retweeting and sharing – and create blog posts or content like that!

You can even contact all the people who shared or linked to similar articles and they’ll probably repost yours too.

What is your session covering and why is it important for our delegates?My session will be covering lots of tips and tools to supercharge and incentivize Facebook Likes and Blog Subscribers. I’ll give you guys awesome tools to spy on your competitors. We have some fascinating studies about Facebook Ads and what factors make the most difference so you can get the maximum amount of cheapest clicks. And many other case studies showing how social media is changing the web and the best resources so you can implement what actually works.

Why should they choose you?I started making my first few thousand in Affiliate Marketing while in school age 15, and started a successful ecommerce business during university. I started from zero capital so I had no choice but to do things the cheapest and most efficient way possible, so that’s what I want to share with you all.

What can delegates expect to learn? And what will be the key takeaways?

I’m going to give you guys tonnes of really powerful tools to automate tasks and syndicate your content across social media and other websites. The key takeaways will be to use these tools to give value first, create long term relationships and leverage of strategic partnerships with the influencers. Another two key takeaways will be this authentic boomerang and didgeridoo from Australia! We will have some audience participation and you can win these during my session!

During your session what question would you ask if you were in the audience?

Aside from your own session, what other sessions will you be attending at a4uexpo Europe and why?

Geno’s session on Growing Your Affiliate Programme at 2.45 on Tuesday should be interesting as he always has great stuff on his blog.

I’m looking forward to Kick Ass SEO panel at 5.15 on Tuesday, there are some very smart people on that panel like Joost from Yoast, I use lots of his WordPress Plugins. I talk in my speech about how it’s important to choose the gaps in the market so trends and insights on search are very useful for any internet entrepreneur.

Another session Facebook. Advertiser Risks, Strategy & Turbo Tips by Curt Simon Harlinghausen at 11am on Wednesday looks great and he has a photo there with Mark Zuckerberg which got my attention, obviously I think Facebook is a huge opportunity right now.

Also the Panda – The Quality Bear of Search Eats Affiliates session at 3pm on Wednesday should be interesting, many affiliates are worried about the Google Panda update but at the same time change creates opportunity. There are a lot of good sessions on at that same time, the Clickbank Digital Information Products session looks very cool, and the Smart Link Building session with Kevin from SEOptimise should be excellent too, as I’ve watched some of his other presentations and they are always full of useful resources.

What one piece of advice would you give to delegates attending this years a4uexpo Europe?

I heard some great advice in New York City about networking from this really smart guy Scott Stratten from unmarketing.com, he said “get to know the person first, then what they do.”

And that would be my advice to everyone at a4uExpo Europe. I talk in my speech about how social media is all about giving value first, and partnering with influencers. Well, all these people at A4uExpo are the influencers. So you could try and sell to these 1000 people and maybe get a few sales, but if you just gave value first and partnered with these 1000 people, the possibilities are endless. So connecting with other people is what it’s all about, so I look forward to seeing all you guys at all the parties, chatting and meeting with as many people as possible.

So I’ll see you all at the Hilton on the Park in Munich, Germany on June 6, 7 and 8.

If you haven’t got your tickets, go to A4uExpo.com and use the coupon SPK10 for 10% off.

– TubeMogul OneLoad Video Distribution – Free Upload Manager for 30 different video sharing sites. Make accounts with Blip.tv, Dailymotion, Facebook, Flickr, iTunes, LinkedIn, Metacafe, MySpace, Photobucket, Twitter, Veoh, Vimeo Plus, YouTube etc and TubeMogul can bulk upload to all of them at once and even re-format the videos to meet each video sharing sites requirements

Video SEO – more traffic to your Video blogs

Sneaky tactic for Video SEO – Youtube Insights. You can choose to turn off giving all your video data to the world. Lots of video owners forget to do this and you just click below the video next to the number of views there is a button for “SHOW VIDEO STATISTICS” so YOU CAN SEE ALL THE SITES LINKING TO THE VIDEO and can see where some sites got their views and what keywords etc.

I met Marty from aimclear.com at SMX Sydney, they’ve done very extensive experiments and found some tricks and slight adjustments to make the same video appear multiple times in search results:
– Make time differ by 30%
– Make versions with male and female voiceovers
– Swap adjectives in the script
– Change the filename
– Change colour / brightness / contrast

I went to Affiliate Summit last year in New York and again in Las Vegas and it was amazing.

If any of you saw my TV interview on Vodafone Business Sense, I was waving around a whole pile of US checks I earnt as a teenager and I told the true story how I got started in Affiliate Marketing when I was aged 15 in school in 1999:

My parents said “Son, we are sending you to work at the local Burger King”

Me “Wait, No .. I’m going to start an internet business, I’m going to have clients from around the world and get checks in the post” … I was really stirring my Dad up … and I also declared at the time as a kid in school “AND … I’m going to speak about it in NEW YORK CITY!”

So I have applied to speak at this years Affiliate Summit East 2011 at Hilton New York City on Aug 21-23 2011

But I need your help to achieve my dream!

There is a VOTE for speakers open now until Fri 13 May (USA time), so Sat 14 May Aust

Would really appreciate your support is you could please VOTE for my session!

Hostnine Reseller Hosting is unique as it allows you to host websites all over the world and you can create multiple website accounts you can CHOOSE which server it is on, and they have many servers across US, UK and ASIA

This is extremely useful if you want sites with different C-Class IP addresses, and means you can links between your sites can carry SEO juice, as usually links from sites on the same host with the same C-Class IP address have no link value.

Hostnine Reseller Hosting is also ideal for resellers with a web hosting business, it allows you to:

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– be your own web host with your own custom nameserver / DNS / control panel

For hosting your personal blog or business website we highly recommend Myhosting

MyHosting.com includes all the resources you need, with:

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The site builder tools are also awesome – you can install WordPress Blogs in
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If you have multiple employees working on the site then the Professional
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So especially if you’re paying for Facebook ads, why send them to your Facebook wall full of douchebag questions and Farmville posts? We’ve all heard how every PPC landing page should have a clear purpose and call to action – first goal for most Facebook Pages should be to get people to click LIKE so you send them updates over and over.

So instead of showing them the wall, you want to show them a custom landing tab with a GIANT arrow that is absolutely clear – click LIKE to get something. Bribe them – with a competition, or free ebook or video works very well. The best way is to give them a sample of what you hope to sell them later. The best performing one I’ve found is “click like to unlock the secret video about …”

See this Facebook Reveal Tab example by Red Bull:

We used to do this with FBML Tabs, but as of March this year Facebook changed and you can no longer add that FBML app. The latest way is to use this Free iFrame app. Static HTML: iframe tabs

Once they click LIKE it will show them a different tab, my advice is give them a video, and below that put your opt-in form for your email database, e.g. I use aweber.

How to install a Facebook Reveal Tab: Guide to installing the Static HTML: iFrame Tabs app:

A window will pop up listing the pages you admin, select the page you want and click “Add to Page”

It will appear in the left column as “Welcome” with a star, click that.

Put the code in the top box to be displayed to non-fans (e.g. an image that says “Click LIKE to unlock the competition / ebook / video)

Put the code in the bottom box to be displayed to fans only (e.g. display the free ebook / video and recommend you put your email newsletter opt-in box such as aweber below)

Go to Manage Permissions > Change the “Default Landing Tab” to this tab

My friend also developed this awesome WordPress plugin WP4FB to create custom Facebook Fan Pages and reveal tabs right from within WordPress, it also allows you to set up the one-click reveal tab and or fan gate to incentivize users to click LIKE to reveal special content, plus other viral features such as a “Suggest to Friends” feature and “Share To Get” feature, which enables you to lock content that can only be unlocked by sharing a messages on the users’ wall.

I’ll update this page and send out all the slides, links and tutorials mentioned in my speech for SMX idol at SMX Sydney 2011 at Hilton Sydney in April 2011 so follow us on Facebook and join our email newsletter (you’ll also be able to download a free copy of our ebook “Make Money with Facebook” instantly).

Charlie Sheen (@charliesheen) has taken to twitter and broken the Guinness World Record for fastest person to amass 1 million twitter followers, which he gained in only 25 hours.

He also launched a Ustream show called “Sheen’s Korner”, with the tagline “You’re either in Sheen’s Korner or with the Trolls”. Sheen unveils a bottle of Tiger Blood which he says is a sponsor for the show. Sheens also reveals a Winning tattoo on his wrist and Sheens and his crew chant “Winning, Winning Winning!”

#winning, #tigerblood, #sheenskorner, #winner and #charliesheen have since gone viral on twitter

Even Paris Hilton (@parishilton) tweeted “Hey Neighbor, I think I might have Tigerblood and I’m definitely winning! Huge!” and again “Can’t wait to see Sheen’s corner!”

What do you guys think of Charlie Sheens new show, #tigerblood and #winning?

The free Expo and free seminars look really good so I’ll be checking them out. Just register online or on the day for free so you get a badge (they also have paid seminar tracks), but these are all free:

Free Keynote PresentationsBasically in a large lecture theatre every morning by industry experts

Free Breakfast Briefings

Free Expo Seminar TheatreAlso basically in the expo hall there are expo theatres where you can just rock up and sit down any time and they have various topics throughout the day. Some of the sessions I am looking forward to include Social Games (Wed 10am) and Video in 2011 and the impact of Social TV (Thursday 1pm)

Free Google @ ad:tech TheatreThis looks awesome and is new this year! When I was in the UK last year at Ad:tech London 2010 they had the Google Ads Factory there which was awesome so this is highly recommended, especially if you want to learn how to set up things with Google and your site. Looks like the same topics run both days, some sessions I am looking forward to are:

10:00 AM – Market Insights And Trends

11:00 AM – Innovation In Search Marketing

1:00 PM – Making your website work harder (about Google Analytics)

5:00 PM – Online video marketing for small and mid-sized businesses

Also FREE is the Networking Party sponsored by NineMSN at The Watershed,
6.30-8.30pm on Wednesday 9th March 2011
Just make sure you register for the free expo badge so you can get into the party, you can also also check the full schedule here:

I would really love to go to the Social Media Sydney event on Tuesday 8th March 6pm at Ivy Room – How to best use Facebook: a deep dive from Facebook Australia. Unfortunately looks like tickets are sold out – if anyone knows or can help me get a spare ticket that would be really appreciated! Tweet me @davecupples
http://smcsyd14.eventbrite.com/

Would be great to have more friends to meetup with during the networking party, expo and we may even grab breakfast with a few people at Darling Harbour.

May also head out on Thursday night in the city for drinks after too. Ivy is great on Thursday night and they have March into Merivale dinner specials so dinner at Uccello Restaurant at Ivy Pool Club could be an option?

Lmk if you will be down there! Anyone coming and visiting Australia from USA or Europe?

I just got my tickets for World Internet Summit next week, run by Brett McFall and Tom Hua and various guest speakers from around the world.

I have been to some of Brett McFall’s “Make Money While You Sleep” seminars before and watched videos online of Tom Hua and various other speakers, they really break down the basics and explain things very simply for beginners. I still picked up a few useful things.

I’ll be honest with you guys, just so you are aware Brett’s seminars and what I have heard of World Internet Summit is that some of the presentations can get salesy towards the end as the speakers try and sell their coaching program or purchase their system. As long as you are aware of this there are also useful things to be learned.

For example, Brett’s session at the Crown Plaza Parramatta and Shangri-La Sydney, was completely free to attend and they hired the whole grand ballroom which must be quite expensive. Usually say the first 3 hours they teach you stuff and demonstrate their knowledge and the last part is about why you should join their paid program for more. If they spend most of the session teaching you stuff and the tickets are free or really cheap then this is fair enough they can plug their program at the end. That is usually the trade off for getting such cheap tickets and free advice.

Other thing is they use a bit of hype like “imagine what your life would be if you were rich” and pics of holidays and fast cars, personally not my style but it is a very successful marketing technique. Also some people in the audience really are some absolute newbie beginners with no clue, not listening, asking silly questions etc which can get annoying. These seminars are by far the EASIEST to follow I have ever seen, but seriously get up to speed and learn to use the internet and email and facebook first or you won’t make money with anything.

One cool thing they do is start an internet business from scratch and one person from the audience gets to keep the profits generated over the weekend, was $50,000 last time!

Tickets for World Internet Summit 2011 Australia are $197 and you can also bring a guest along for free, plus you get a Free World Internet Passport for future summits. I guess this is pretty cheap compared to other seminars such as ad:tech Sydney where the 2 day paid seminars cost $2000 (adtech does have a free expo theatre which I will be checking out this year too).

Anyway lmk if you guys are coming to World Internet Summit. Anyone have any feedback from attending previous World Internet Summits, what did you guys think?

SMX Sydney
Hilton
April 14th and 15th 2011
Also in the Expo Hall Theatre a free 2 day Online Marketer Boot Camp runs which is highly recommended (I went to the free bootcamp at SMX Sydney 2010 and SMX Melbourne 2011)

Affiliate Summit East 2011
Hilton New York City
August 21-23, 2011
I went to Affiliate Summit East 2010 and Affiliate Summit West 2011 and both were awesome so this is highly recommended. I should be there in New York for #ASE11 this year, if you are coming let me know!

Adtech London
September 21-22, 2010
Accepting proposals: until June 23, 2010

SMX New York
Javits Convention Center
Sept 13-15 2011

SMX Stockholm
Sept 2011

A4uexpo London
18-19 Oct 2011

If you guys are heading to any of these conferences or any other good ones keep in touch!

Chris Pearson from Pearsonified.com (creator of the Thesis WordPress Theme) is an awesome speaker and here are some key takeaways from my notes as I was in the audience for his session “Tips and Tricks to Increase Website Conversions” at Affiliate Summit West 2011 in Las Vegas:

Predict what the user is going to do – and help them.

Facilitate them through the process, keep them away from clicking anything else to divert their attention.

Page Headlines – spell out benefits, show how easy, be specific and believable

Body copy – should be benefit focused, not feature laden, overcome objections to capture indecisive people

Picture captions and headlines are read twice as much – so put key benefits here

Risk aversion like guarantees are huge for conversions, esp when around action buttons

Having 1,2,3 offers is great – psychological framing. Question becomes which one should I buy? Not should I buy.

2 or 3 offerings is the magic number. 5 or 10 offerings is too confusing and conversions plummet.

Suggest the most popular option.

Facilitators – Verisign logo, No minimum term, cancel any time.

Attach element of scarcity without being a liar.

Everyone at Affiliate Summit was raving about the Thesis Theme for WordPress as it allows super advanced customization of columns, fast loading and a good theme for SEO.

Chris is the developer of the Thesis WordPress Theme which everyone at Affiliate Summit was raving about – for more information see our Thesis Theme Review.

A Sydney woman Heidi Clarke did an online video about how she met a man at a cafe, didn’t get his number and can’t stop thinking about him. But in the video she shows he left his jacket behind, its beautiful has silk lining, claims to want to find him and give his jacket back.

The video went viral on youtube but was exposed as a viral marketing stunt for the jacket by an Australian menswear retailer.

Has been criticised as when first contacted by newspapers, she said it was a genuine search for love and not a fake viral stunt.

Lesson – most experts have agreed it is best to let the cat out of the bag, especially once caught. This video did suffer backlash and scathing comments from youtube. As of February 2011 it had 250,000 views but 363 dislikes compared to 152 likes.

Watch the youtube video “are you my man in the jacket”:

What do you guys think? Did this stunt do more harm than good? Was the 250,000 views worth it or did they come across as dishonest and make their viewers feel cheated?

On a United Airlines Flight, Dave Carroll saw United Airlines baggage handlers throwing and breaking his $3,500 taylor guitar. He complained to United staff but according to him they didn’t care, and United would not pay for the damage.

Dave them published a song “United Breaks Guitars” which went viral on Youtube, the chorus went “I should have flown with someone else, or gone by car, ’cause United breaks guitars.”

It amassed 150,000 views in 1 day and was all over the media, including CNN, the LA Times, Chicago Tribune, Rolling Stone Magazine & the BBC. While United refused to compensate for the damage, Taylor Guitars stepped up and gave Dave Taylor 2 free Guitar and props for his next song.

As at Feb 2011, the video has almost 10 million views on Youtube, and has been a tremendous boost for Dave Carroll and his band Sons of Maxwell who made a trilogy of videos about the saga. “United Breaks Guitars” was ranked #7 in the Top Ten Viral Videos of 2009 by Time Magazine.

Alan Long from Experian Hitwise gave a few examples of viral marketing at SMX Melbourne Social Media Boot-camp 2010:

– Tourism Queensland’s Best Job in the World – went viral, they used viral video, posted classified ads for their job (which was to be an island caretaker on the Great Barrier Reef and be paid $150,000 a year to have fun snorkelling and swimming the barrier reef). They placed all sorts of online recruitment ads and users submitted videos to apply.

– Hey Hey it’s Saturday – was a popular TV show in Australia but got cut from air. A girl from Adeliade started a Facebook Page to bring “Hey Hey it’s Saturday” back. There were a few reunion shows and over 100,000 facebook fans, and Hey Hey it’s Saturday returned to air.

– Comcast Guy – Comcast guy fell asleep in a girls apartment while on the phone back to comcast about how to install, she took a video and uploaded to youtube and it went viral. Embarassing at first but Comcast turned it around, they used the guys face and slogan “Comcast Cares” to show they helped customers with problems.

SEOmoz was there, their tool Open Site Explorer is great for seeing the backlinks your competitors have.

Brent Payne from the Chicago Tribune (@BrentDPayne) had a neat little trick: Put the keyword first in the headline, followed by a colon, then followed by a typical headline e.g. Gmail down: 5 things to do when Gmail is down

Many mentioned SEOQuake SEO Extension for Firefox which is a great free add-on for Mozilla Firefox, you can see the Alexa Rank, Google Backlinks, Page Rank, Yahoo Backlinks etc for any website, when you search Google it will also show you all of these metrics for the search results. Great for checking whether the keyword is worth targeting. Use SEOQuake to see how many other sites link to your site and to competitors.

Another free tool I keep hearing is SEMRush.com – find out how many times your website and competitors come up in searches and for what keywords.

Also popuri.us, for checking links and rankings of sites

Each target phrase should ideally have its own landing page, one page can only rank for so much (Mike Motherwell, WMS Consulting)

Great Free Directories for Australian Businesses. Submit your small business to these online Australian business directories (Recommended by Monte Huebsch, Aussieweb)

Namechk – Free social media username checker – enter a username here and it will check the top social networking sites to see if that username is available. Good to have a constant username across all sites.

Tubemogul – Free online video uploader and syndicator. Distribute to multiple online video sites and easily see analytics for your videso across all sites. Upload in one go to Blip.tv, Dailymotion, Facebook, Flickr, iTunes, Metacafe, MySpace, Twitter, Vimeo Plus, YouTube and more, as well as a large list of content specific niche sites

Tweetbeep – Useful twitter tool can alert you when someone tweets about a certain phrase, you can respond

At Social Media Marketing Las Vegas Peter VanRynsdam did a talk on “How NOT to go Viral”.

I heard a few interesting stories of viral youtube videos that turned out to be sneaky marketing ploys by companies:

Sydney Cinderella Jacket Man – woman met a man at a cafe, didn’t get his number, does a youtube video to find him, she shows he left his jacket behind, says its a beautiful jacket, has silk lining etc. The video went viral on youtube but was exposed as a viral marketing stunt for the jacket

All I Want for Xmas is a PSP – 9 yr old put a rap video why he should get a PSP. Was all a stunt by sony

Peter says faking it can work but rather than fooling people and being dishonest its works better when they go way over the top. A good example was:

NFL Fantasy File by NFL.com and Reebok – featured many videos of NFL stars doing amazing things in order to get picked, such as Laurence Maroney running up and jumping through a car, in the window one side and out the other. The videos easily got over 20 millions views and thousands of comments from people debating whether the impossible stunts were fake.

At various conferences around the world I have heard from big podcasters and youtube themselves – they stress to beware with using copyrighted sound in your youtube video.

If you use a commercial music soundtrack to your video, they then own the rights to it. Youtube constantly scans the audio of videos to find copyrighted music, you may get your video deleted, audio disabled and if you do not own the copyright of the sound, that means you cannot earn from the video and youtube instead would allow the music copyright holder to serve ads against the video.

Here is a list of resources for to find Royalty Free Music for Youtube Videos and Creative Commons Audio for Podcasts:

American babysitter Ashley Kerekes who unknowingly chose the twitter username @theashes has been hit for six after being inundated with messages from cricket fans following the First Ashes Cricket Test between Australia and England in Brisbane this week.

She tweeted back repeatedly “this is not the account of the cricket match. Check profiles before you send mentions, its incredibly annoying and rude” until finally flipping out and tweeting “I AM NOT A FREAKING CRICKET MATCH!!!” and “what the hell is a wicket?”

That only fuelled the fire with @theashes becoming an internet sensation, in a few days quickly going from 300 to amassing 7500 twitter followers. Qantas stepped in, offering to fly her from New York to Australia for the Ashes with the #gettheashestotheashes campaign, which soon went viral and had other companies jumping on the bandwagon such as #theashes sponsor Vodafone, offering a free phone and match tickets.

This was an excellent case of the right way to embrace viral social media marketing by Qantas and Vodafone, similar to the famous example of when 2 Coca-Cola lovers in Los Angeles started a Coca-Cola Fan Page themselves on Facebook which took off and garnered millions of fans. Rather than using lawyers to seize the Facebook account and risk being perceived as heavy-handed and alienating company evangelists, Coca-Cola partnered with the enthusiastic fans to run the page together and flew them to Atlanta for a tour of Coca-Cola Headquarters. It was a smart move which paid off, as Coca-Cola now has almost 20 million Facebook Likes and is the 8th most popular Facebook Page in the world. The Red Kangaroo @Qantas_Airways had only a few twitter followers before #gettheashestotheashes but is already hopping up the twittersphere.

So will @theashes accept the offer to come to Australia? At first she was reluctant to travel alone and tweeted a request for two tickets which is very likely to be granted as she is now a celebrity being flooded with requests for media interviews. While Ash promises this was all an accident and she had no idea when she registered the twitter profile, she has also joined the marketing bonanza adding the twitter tagline “If you’re going to harass me about cricket, at least buy a t-shirt.”

As for learning the rules of cricket, her friendly Indian cab driver should fill her in on the way to JFK Airport (that is what happened to me just recently after an Internet Marketing conference in New York City) the cab driver was so excited to hear I was from Australia, he even played YouTube cricket videos of the Pakistan cricket betting scandal on his iPhone and passed it to me in the back to watch!

We would love your comments below – what do you think of the move by Qantas and Vodafone? What are some of your other favourite examples of great Social Media Marketing by companies? Will this help cricket catch on in baseball-mad America?

Hey guys, just arrived in the USA from Australia for Affiliate Summit West at Wynn Las Vegas so went snowboarding at Lake Tahoe for a few days first. Awesome weather, bright sunshine just like Sydney, yet lots of snow, the only reason I needed my beanie was to not get sunburnt!

From about 0.50 in the video this 3yr old skiing toddler bully swerves straight at me, and so I don’t hit him I end up stacking it and sliding horizontally head first into a tree! When I stopped the tree was right in front of my face!

At first I thought it was an accident, but if you listen carefully, at 0.52 the toddler clearly says “make you fall” then as he skis away he says something about “your head”. What exactly did that kid say? Even weirder earlier at 0.43-0.46 a kid says loudly “I fell right there over hitting the tree”, so maybe he planned the whole thing!

Haha so what do you guys think? Did this little skiing toddler bully do this on purpose or what! If so it was pretty hilarious and I’m glad he skied away unscathed. These kids on the slopes are unbelievable, there was another young kid who did a backflip while skiing!

Thanks to my friend Dr James (also from Australia, working as a snowboarding instructor at Lake Tahoe atm) for the snowboarding tips and filming (you were laughing at the toddler and not me right?)

Catch u guys at CES or Affiliate Summit West Las Vegas, follow @fatcowbusiness on twitter if you are going to be there or to get all the updates and free business tips for making money online!

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MyReviewPlugin Review

MyReviewPlugin is simply the best WordPress review plugin available. You may notice that MyReviewPlugin powers all the comparison tables on our home page and category pages here on FatCowBusiness.com and many of our other sites, complete with those little cow ratings!

I researched all the other WordPress Review Plugins in the market like WP Review Engine and no other plugin has features or support that come close to MyReviewPlugin.

MyReviewPlugin Demo / Example

MyReviewPlugin turns WordPress in to a one-click review site with star ratings, editor ratings, custom fields, automatic embedding, automatic plugin installation, 5 great themes and more. MyReviewPlugin can help you build review websites fast that can earn lots of cash. Website developers that need to get websites built and online fast will appreciate this powerful plugin. It’s simple to use and the plugin features includes one-click installation, integration and set up. No technical skills are required when you use MyReviewPlugin. You will be able to control everything from within your WordPress blog.

Building websites using MyReviewPlugin is done within the Administration area and you won’t have to write a single line of complicated programming code, such as CSS, Javascript, PHP and HTML when developing web pages for your site. If you want to watch this powerful plugin in action, click on the “Demo” button that’s located on the website’s homepage to see how it works.

Purchasing the type of license that you want for MyReviewPlugin is quite simple, and you place your order, their ordering system will automatically send you a download link. The Single Site License costs $90. You can run “MyReviewPlugin” on a single website. The plugin also includes lifetime updates and lifetime technical support.

The Unlimited Site License costs $130. You can run MyReviewPlugin on any number of websites that you want (for life!). It also includes lifetime updates, and lifetime priority technical support. And, the Unlimited Site License includes a 3 Extra Theme Bonus Pack. The three extra theme bonuses enables you to run stunning affiliate landing pages. The plugin also includes lifetime updates and lifetime technical support.

MyReviewPlugin also includes step-by-step tutorials and training videos. You can receive personal assistance, too.

Mark and the support for MyReviewPlugin has also been awesome, he is very helpful implementing MyReviewPlugin with your theme and answers questions very quickly and is constantly improving MyReviewPlugin and implementing users suggestions.

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If you ship globally the best Affiliate Network for Cost per Sale Commission Based Offers where you pay commission per confirmed sale is ShareASale. Even although it’s a Global Network most of the large Australian affiliates belong to them too and they do run AU offers too. They are really good and really helpful people, they sponsor all the parties at Affiliate Summit which I go to in New York and Las Vegas.

Merchants can run an affiliate program where you decide the commission to pay and only pay for results. ShareASale has been established since 2000 and allows you to access a leading network of affiliates and publisher websites.

Shareasale has the best features of any affiliate network (even the big ones that charge $3000/month) and here are a couple of key features:

REAL-TIME TRACKING – YOU’LL KNOW THE MOMENT A BANNER IS CLICKED, A SALE IS MADE AND A COMMISSION IS GENERATED.

CLICKSTREAM ATTRIBUTION – THE CLICK STREAM REPORT ALLOWS YOU TO VIEW RECENT CLICKS THAT A CONSUMER MADE PRIOR TO THE PURCHASE. RULE-BASED COMMISSIONS CAN BE SETUP UTILIZING THE TIMESTAMP DATA IN THIS REPORT.

Affiliate Networks just provide a tracking / payment platform and for any affiliate program to get off the ground involves reaching out to partners in your niche with high traffic websites or large databases and getting them to promote your product. That is why any successful affiliate program needs an Affiliate Manager or Outsourced Program Manager to recruit affiliates and encourage the influencers in your niche market or the large affiliates / publishers to promote your offer to their databases and to their followers. It is also essential to maintain an Affiliate Newsletter and have regular communications like making a calendar of promotions to keep sending to affiliates to promote. You also need someone who knows what they are doing to reguarly approve and communicate with affiliates and setup the program with the right agreement and put rules in place to prevent rogue affiliates like trademark bidders and malware / adware / toolbars etc highjacking your program.

Dave and FatCowBusiness have 15+ years experience in Affiliate Marketing both as a Merchant, Publisher and Consultant so we know all the tricks of the trade and also have many contacts from travelling the world speaking at all the biggest Affiliate Marketing conferences around the world including Affiliate Summit and A4uExpo so if you would like us to setup / manage your program or provide expert consulting please contact us.

Shareasale Setup Fees, Monthly Fees and Transaction Fees

ShareASale are also very upfront and transparent about their fees which are very reasonable. The network access fee of $550 (the other big Affiliate Networks like Linkshare and CJ have startup fees of thousands of dollars plus monthly fees starting at thousands per month. After that fees are very reasonable only 20% fee of what you pay to affiliates, there is a grace period for the first 4 months and after that, if your account does not generate a minimum of $25 in fees to ShareASale, your account will be charged the difference each month.

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I have researched the affiliate networks in Australia and if you are looking for a Self Serve Australian Affiliate Network Clixgalore is by far the cheapest to get started with. There are no monthly fees and no setup fee, you just have to deposit $150 and that is used towards paying your affiliates. Unlike other networks, as stated there are NO joining / setup fees, or monthly fees. You can join clixGalore Affiliate Marketing and start promoting your website for as little as $150 (This is your opening account balance and used to pay your Affiliate commissions). Clixgalore just charges a 25% service fee of what is paid to the affiliate every time a sale goes through.

Publishers earn revenue and Merchants increase website traffic and sales – Only Pay Commission When You Receive An Order At Your Website.

When Affiliates place Merchant banners or text advertisements on their websites, in emails or newsletters, the Merchant will specify how much they are willing to pay Affiliates for a ‘sale’, ‘lead’ or ‘click’ from the Affiliates website to the Merchants website. When one of the above transactions occur, the Affiliate is paid. The clixGalore Affiliate Marketing service fee is 25% and based on what is paid to the Affiliate. For example, if a Merchant is willing to pay an Affiliate $10 per sale, the Affiliate will receive $10, clixGalore Affiliate Marketing will receive $2.5. The total cost to the Merchant is $12.5.

Guys please be aware that if you are paying no monthly fee and no setup fee there is unfortunately very little service or response from Clixgalore. So at the moment I would recommend putting your program on the ShareASale Affiliate Network which offers far greater features and communication.

In any case, with all Affiliate Networks please understand you are really just getting a tracking / payment platform and for any affiliate program to get off the ground involves reaching out to partners in your niche with high traffic websites or large databases and getting them to promote your product. That is why people pay larger networks charge thousands of dollars per month to encourage the influencers in your niche market or the large affiliates / publishers out there to promote your offer to their databases and to their followers. You could also hire an Affiliate Manager or Outsourced Program Manager to recruit affiliates and put rules in place to prevent rogue affiliates like trademark bidders and malware toolbars etc highjacking your program.

Dave and FatCowBusiness have 15+ years experience in Affiliate Marketing both as a Merchant, Publisher and Consultant so we know all the tricks of the trade and also have many contacts from travelling the world speaking at all the biggest Affiliate Marketing conferences around the world including Affiliate Summit and A4uExpo so if you would like us to setup / manage your program or provide expert consulting please contact us.

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